26 May 2008

Memorial Day and our first bona fide venture into the nation’s capital. We arrived at our summer abode in Silver Spring, MD early Saturday evening after a very smooth and pleasant drive South from New Haven. Almost miraculously, we never got lost, not even a little bit. When Justin asked Sander, a D.C. native, about the best driving route from New Haven to D.C., Sander replied that one simply got on I-95 and never got off. “Not even you could mess it up,” he added. Justin took this as a challenge, but we arrived safely anyway.

Sunday morning we attended church in the Kinsington Ward, which meets in a stake center adjacent to the Washington D.C. temple. Worshiping in a building that houses a basketball court made us feel like Mormons again.

This morning we went shopping. The trip was occasioned by the coincidence of Justin’s beginning work as a summer associate at Winston & Strawn tomorrow and his having failed, amazingly, to pack any dress pants at all (he survived his Sunday meetings on a mildly oversized loan pair). Because Justin’s dress clothes on the date to his mission at the latest, to high school days at the earliest, it seemed an appropriate time to launch a major sartorial overhaul. And the largesse of the Federal Government’s economic stimulus package—minus funds already earmarked for maternity pants and Professor Totto’s interactive Italian lessons—gave us the wherewithal to execute such a revolution. At morning’s end, Justin left the Wheaton mall with five pairs of pants, four new shirts, three new ties, two new jackets, and a Dora sock. (Actually the Dora sock was Eli’s, but its inclusion in the previous sentence served as a convenient literary device, subtlely situating the present post in the venerable tradition of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”)

In the afternoon we acquainted ourselves with the D.C. Metro. We tested how long it takes to arrive from the Silver Spring stop to Farragut North, where one finds the D.C. office of Winston & Strawn (about thirty minutes). We then wandered aimlessly, taking in the White House, the Washington monument, and the Capitol in the background, before arriving at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum (since Justin, an inveterate dinosaur nut [at least at age six], has been to this museum before, we wonder whether the wandering was really quite so aimless . . . ). This place the girls loved, running from display to display shrieking, “Look Mommy! It’s a ___!” When the excursion was over and we were safe returned to Silver Spring, Justin asked Julia if she had enjoyed her trip. “Yes,” she replied. “But I didn’t like the going home part so much.”