To Grandmother's House

Over the river, through the woods, across two time zones, three airports and sixteen states, losing my nail-clippers, my favorite (and expensive) sunglasses and forgetting my book, my medication and most of my sanity, I traveled to our nation’s capitol last week. For my international readers, that would be Washington, D.C. What does the “D.C.” stand for? Funny you should ask that. As far as I could ascertain, it stands for “direct current”. I don’t know how that applies to the city of Washington, which describes just about anything but D.C.

It might be time for me to stop traveling and find the love of a good woman, or a new patchwork quilt.

Either will do.

Email me for my address if you can find one.

Yeppers, for those of you who missed last week’s article, it was because there was no article (See how that works? That’s called a causal relationship.). I would like to say that it was in mourning/protest for the lack of Joel Stein articles in Time Magazine (or as I like to call it, that communist-crowd-pleasing-fascist-rag), or something equally profound. But the truth was that I was allowing a guy I didn’t know to take me tens of thousands of feet into the air, in a hollow metal tube with wings, produced and sold by the lowest bidder.

How do I know it was made by the lowest bidder?

Have you sat in those seats?

Lemmings have more room when they go over a cliff.

But my trip wasn’t all a barrel of laughs and National Guardsmen toting M-16s and psychotic smiles. I got to sit through hours of presentations by people who have made a life of writing grants and proposals to the largest consumer of paper in the world: the U.S. Government. After listening to them “speak” I knew why their chosen profession had nothing to do with public presentation. These are people who couldn’t close a glass of water deal in the Sahara.

You think I’m joking.

And those seats in the conference rooms were made by the same sadist-with-a-chip-on-his-shoulder that designed the airplane seats.

But after the conference, there was nothing like heading to a local restaurant where a burger might cost you $10. At the restaurant in the hotel I stayed at, they were much more reasonable: $15 plus gratuity if you ordered room service. Fifteen bucks just for some guy in a tux to carry your burger to your room on a tray and call you “sir”.

Ok, well I admit I like when they called me sir.

And they smiled when they said that.

But the worst part was when I realized that I had spent more time over the last three weeks on the road and in strange beds (and alone, I might add . . . damn, damn alone) then I had been at home. Granted, this was no Grateful Dead tour, but then they had Jerry to lead them and I was all on my own (damn, damn alone).

If you could play some violin music now, it would help the mood.

On the other side, I did get to see the Capitol building, the Library of Congress (which is actually three buildings) and Grand Central Station. Although, for some reason I could never quite make it to the Mall. I kept looking for a large building with lots of stores as I had seen at home; you know, where I could buy Bernie Botts Every Flavor Beans, but I never found it. You would think the signs would have been a little more specific. I wandered up and down this green meadow-like swath of acreage, past famous memorials to dead-white-males, but I never found this supposed “Mall” of Washington D.C.

I didn’t even find a strip-mall.

I think it’s a local joke.