But everything is always new, even when it's old, so although I went to the Lincoln Memorial and saw that old familiar face, and read the Gettysburg Address etched into one wall, and wondered really what to think or feel that hadn't been felt a million times before, I also eavesdropped on two young student types, who I think were probably of Indian heritage-- from India, I mean, or maybe Pakistan--and one asked the other, do you think there will ever be a president again who people will build such a monument to? His friend thought it was possible, but he thought not. He said that people don't idolize presidents in the same way anymore. His friend thought that some situation might be possible, that a lot depended on context. I don't know if Lincoln was so popular while he was still hale and hearty, and I wonder a bit why Kennedy has no monument, if assassination is a key to people remembering you in a favorable light. It was Kennedy, not Lincoln, who seemed to be hovering as a ghostly presence over my journey. Still, it is a marvelous thing to stand at the Lincoln memorial at night and hear the gentle debate of immigrants' children, if not immigrants themselves, wondering aloud about the status of presidents past and present.
That night too, and it was a nighttime trip we made between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, we visited the Vietnam War Memorial. I had declined on the Korean War Memorial as my foot was bothering me, but I thought I'd tick this one off, when I suddenly remembered that I knew someone who would be memorialized here. There are little directory style books that help you figure out where a name might be located, and it actually wasn't much trouble at all to find this one. I had never met this person--he died before I met his sister, but I felt that I did know him a little, because once, a long time ago, she had given me some of his letters to read. I am of the age just a little beyond many of the vets of that war, but in another version of life I might have known him. His decision to join the army rather than resist was a decision born of conscience, not a desire to go to war. He was one of the few UCSC students to go and die there. I have just learned that while in Vietnam, he wrote frequent letters to the UCSC student paper, City On a Hill. It would be interesting to read these if they are archived somewhere.
We found his name in the wall by flashlight. My sister very helpfully took a picture. George Walter Skakel, I am sorry I never had the chance to meet you.
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I'm glad you had a good trip. I was just talking about the Vietnam memorial with someone while I was also, recently, gone...
ReplyDeleteThanks, Kathleen. Judging by how full all my flights were, a lot of people have been 'gone' at this time of year, which seems a bit early to me.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't planned to go to the Vietnam memorial, and am really glad that I suddenly remembered to look for George. I have met several vets of that era lately. One, in fact, had been at the graduation dinner that very evening.
Thank you for sharing your impressions of D.C. I've been visiting the city for thirty years, but never often enough to be unimpressed. A visit to the Kennedy graves at Arlington National Cemetery might be the experience you are lacking.
ReplyDeleteMaybe so. I think I only saw a picture of the portrait you mentioned on your blog, but I did see firsthand the joint portrait of John and Robert having a tete-a-tete. Quite resonant.
ReplyDeleteI remember a thrill the first time I visited the Lincoln Memorial and, in the little room beneath, watched a tape of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
ReplyDeleteAnother impression of my first visit to Washington is that everybody who lives or works in the city should be issued sunglasses at birth. The sun glinting off all that marble makes it one of the more glare-vulnerable cities on the planet.
We didn't make it to the little room beneath, but it was night.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I noticed was that almost all of the service industry seemed to be black or foreign, which is not the way it is set up here. I don't know if it was just the parts of the city we were in, but it was hard not to notice it. On the one hand, Latinos probably fill more of that role here than I notice, but was also just more evident because the area around Dupont Circle where we were staying seemed very white and privileged. And I don't mean snooty or anything, just that it was evident.
That observation might apply to many cities. One can understand why it might be especially noticeable amid all the lofty sentiments and monuments, and perhaps even more noticeable in Dupont Circle, among whose attractions are a great variety of ethnic restaurants.
ReplyDeleteOn my most recent visit to Washington, however, I spent more time among animals than among people.
It probably does, but I haven't noticed it so much in New York, Boston or Chicago, which you would think might have the same dynamics. I was talking with a friend who had gone to school back east, and I think she shared a similar observation even before I brought it up. It wasn't that they were all doing lowly jobs or anything--it just seemed like somehow the service industry had developed in a different way.
ReplyDeleteAnd didn't a Skakel marry into the Kennedy family and get himself into some trouble?
ReplyDeleteI don't know how much this has to to do with Washington's current demographics, but I have read that before World War II, it was a sleepy Southern town. I also have a colleague who is a D.C. native, from the part, she says, where the tourists don't go.
Yes, my friend and her brother and sister are cousins of those Skakels. Ethel Skakel Kennedy was actually the person who married in, it was another cousin who got in trouble. But my friend's family grew up out west and wasn't part of that life.
ReplyDeleteI have been reading two DC books that show how many communities really live there. One was This Town, which is all about the connected 500 who thrive around the center of power and the other is George Pelecanos's Drama City, which is about people just trying to stay out of jail and definitely goes nowhere near all the nice buildings we tourists see. They complement each other in a weird way.
The connected 500 in a town like Washington would probably be an interesting list. I wonder how deep their roots are in Washington.
ReplyDeleteNot all of them that deep. But what the book makes clear is that so many of them never leave.
ReplyDeleteOne does not normally think of Washington as a city with much of a past. But sooner or later it must develop one. Apparently it already has.
DeleteI also bought a book while there called Literary Washington D.C. which features selections from various authors who had been there. It starts with Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. That's as far as I've gotten so far. I hadn't known that Alcott traveled there to take up her post as a nurse in the Civil War.
ReplyDeleteI might look for that book. I'd be curious to learn what those observant visitors thought of this new, completely planned city. I wonder also if any literary figures other than visitors are associated with Washington.
ReplyDeleteYes, there are a few longtime residents, as well as a couple of people who were actually born there.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know anyone except for my colleague was ever born there.
ReplyDeleteGore Vidal was, for one.
ReplyDeleteActually, that's wrong. He spent his boyhood there, but was born in West Point, New York. The writers Edward Jones and Marita Golden, though, are natives.
ReplyDeleteIt might be interesting to read a memoir of Washington's transition from sleepy Southern town to what it is today.
ReplyDeleteNot a memoir, but I have heard Gore Vidal's novel Washington DC, is very good and it covers the year 1937 into the Cold War.
ReplyDeleteThose would be just the years. Thanks.
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