Requiem for the Pavilion

The first of this month, a downtown DC landmark closed, and with it closed some of my first memories of Washington.  The Pavilion at the Old Post Office was a downtown shopping mall and food court set in the first two levels of what had once been the main post office at 12th and Pennsylvania Ave NW, its iconic bell tower looming in many famous photos of the avenue.

The building is now being emptied, as Donald Trump has purchased it and will be turning it into a hotel.  But it had been on life-support for years; its heyday was a full two decades ago, and of late has been only a motley collection of souvenir stands and the last hangers-on in the food court.

I remember being wowed by "The Pavilion" as a freshman at AU in 1985, and it's been a part of my life pretty much for the last 29 years.  After college, on coming to work two blocks away, it became a place to find lunch--and for a couple of years, its expansion into the IRS building meant indoor mini-golf in the evenings.  That expansion didn't last long; I think it probably closed in the mid-1990s, and nothing's happened with that wing in nearly 20 years.  I've often wondered how many inches of dust have accumulated in there.

When I moved back to DC in 1992, there were two restaurants on the ground floor; one whose name I forget in the northwest corner (more casual), and the more formal Fitch, Fox & Brown in the northeast corner.  I remember taking my mom there for dinner one time; the waiters were presumptuous and pretentious at the same time.

The tower tours were free and self-guided, which was great.  I remember one time the various co-chairs of the Director's Advisory Committees were in town for a meeting.  We all walked over and took the tour, up to the bells and the views across the city.  Now, I'm sure, The Donald will charge for the privilege of the view.

Since 9/11, the mostly ineffectual security guards placed at the doors (to protect the Federal tenants on the upper floors, like the National Institute for the Humanities, from terrorist attack) likely contributed to driving down foot traffic and thus the closing of some shops.  One of the best cobblers I ever knew worked in the downstairs lobby.  I cannot remember his name, but he was Australian, and there wasn't anything he couldn't do with my shoes to restore them.  He packed it in about 11 years ago.  I miss having a cobbler nearby.

The "philately" post office was another reason to stop by.  It only sold stamps and similar basic postal materials--wouldn't handle a package for you, for instance--but I could always see the newest ones without waiting in the lines at the Franklin station across the street.  Briefly, there was a half-price tickets place next to it, selling same-night seats for various theaters around town (National Theater, Warner Theater, etc).  That also died years ago.

The food court downstairs was largely unchanged for most of the last three decades.  The "international side" to the west, with the Chinese, Italian, and "foreign" cuisine, and with the opposite side of the food court stocked with hot dogs, burger places, and the like.

My favorite place to go in there was actually tucked away half under the stairs in the back: Temptations.  This tiny place had a double display case of baked treats (double chocolate cake, pies, eclairs, etc.) and an espresso machine behind the counter.  But that's not why I went.  Temptations was run by the same family the entire time I was there, and they made the best lemonade ever.

Order a "fresh-squeezed" lemonade and the guy would open up a food-service bucket of halved lemons, and--always using a plastic fork--spear a half lemon and place it into the juicer on the counter.  A rotation of the handle, and fresh lemon juice would flow out the bottom into the clear plastic cup.  He would then put the drip cup back under the juicer, and pop the squeezed lemon off the top and into your cup, to which then was added two scoops of sugar, ice to the top of the cup, and then water--always bottled water from a gallon jug.  A cocktail shaker was produced, and the water, lemon juice, sugar, and lemon husk were then vigorously shaken awhile before being poured triumphantly back into the cup.  Add the plastic top to the cup, then a straw and precisely one napkin, and for $1.89 you had the best lemonade you could ever want.  Perfect on a spring or summer day in the mid-afternoon, especially with a snickerdoodle from Larry's Cookies across the way.

The closure of the Pavilion is, of course, a long time coming--we've seen this particular train coming from well down the tracks.  But its passing means more than just the inability to find the best lemonade, the best cobbler.  It's a little piece of my own story of life in Washington coming to an end, a story that now reaches nearly 30 years itself, and so its absence leaves a little ache.

But one I'm looking for a new lemonade stand to help me fill.

The Running Girl, May 2014 Edition

Once again, Sarah's interest in cross-country running has led her to the Girls on the Run program--now known at the middle school as Girls On Track, even though they don't do track events and still train for a 5K.  This morning was the spring 5K, after a season of training, and as you can see she was very excited about the day!

Sarah at Girls on the Run

This year, GOTR came to its senses and split the event across two days in two locations--meaning we no longer had the same huge crowds and parking problems, making it a much more enjoyable event.  Sarah also benefited from the thinner crowds, running her best race ever!

When the results were posted, Sarah completed her 5K in 30:41, her fastest time ever--and slightly annoying to her, as she really expected to be sub-30 this time.  However, her time was good enough for her to finish #138 out of 1,971 runners (top 7% of all runners); among her age group (girls 10-14), she finished #44 out of 493 girls (top 9%).  What an outstanding run!

This year, being all old and stuff, Sarah didn't need her daddy to be a buddy runner anymore; she ran with friends from SCMS.  However, that meant for the first time Eric and Mary had the chance to get a cup of coffee while she ran, and then be there at the finish line to see her cross.  This time we got video of the big finish:

Sarah's already announced that when she gets to the high school, she wants to go out for cross-country.  Maybe that means Daddy will have to start training to be able to keep up with her.  In the meantime, she's a huge winner to us for completing her seventh 5K and doing so well.  Congratulations, Sarah, on a tremendous race and great improvement!

Sometimes, You Just Need A Good Rant

…and when you do, why not turn to one of the masters?

"I can't take it anymore! I'm trying to get home for my kid's birthday but this whole leaf-blowing false-advertising traffic-stopping tax-dollars-squandering workers-on-permanent-coffee-break upper-class money-driving stolen-car-parts-dealing sign-changing society won't let me!  And you know who's to blame? We all are! We say we hate lawyers but we can't wait to sue somebody.  We want leaders to make tough choices and we vote 'em out when they do! We all want X-rated older women with hirsute upper lips on chat lines and scream bloody murder when we get the bill!  I ask you, what's happened to logic in the world?

"And when you think about it, isn't that exactly the point?  Parking and driving and shopping and eating and working…somewhere, somehow they're different now, none of 'em are the same, they all got chewed up and spit back out.  They don't taste like living anymore.  Don't you see what it's like in this deranged Waring blender of a world?  Every day is an agonizing ordeal!  Like balancing a pot of scalding water on your head while people whip your legs and butt!  (Ah, you never forget your senior prom…)  You think I'm sick?  Well, the only disease I've got is modern life.  A schnub-busting gauntlet of inefficiency and misery that's one long parade of let-downs, put-downs, trickle-downs, shut-outs, freeze-outs, sell-outs, numb-nuts, nincompoops and nimrods!  All making every day as much fun as waxing a flaming Pontiac with your tongue!  Where even if you do luck into the possibility of some fleeting pleasure, like, say, if some nymphomaniac telephone operators with the muscle control of Romanian mat-slappers agree to a little strip air hockey, it'll be over before it starts!  Because some vowel-whacking feather-eating cab jockey slams his Checker up your hatchback, and the cab is owned by some Santaria cult in Huaculpa who starts shaking chicken bones at you and gives you a boil on your neck so big all it needs is Michael Jordan's autograph on it to make it complete!  And even with all this--with all this!--I still drag my sorry butt off the Sealy every morning and stick my face in the reaping machine for one more day--knowing! when it's time to flash the cosmic car keys at those pearly gates I won't be in the coffin anyway, because some underhanded undertaker sold my heart, pancreas, and other assorted Good-n-Plenty to the same Santaria cult!  So does anybody really wonder why anybody is hanging on to sanity by the atoms on the tips of their fingernails while life dirty-dances on their digits?  And is it really any wonder that I seem DERANGED?"

(Duckman, "Room With A Bellevue," 1996…for the originals, see here and here)

Beginning the College Hunt, Part II

When we last left our hero, David had found his way to the basement of Washington Hall on the campus of William and Mary, where he had been told the anthropology department lived.  We passed students on the stairs as we descended, leading us to think a class had just let out; when we arrived at the anthropology lab, the woman there invited us in to look around.

For the next hour, hour and a half, David was truly in his element.

The woman he met, Ms Victor, is a graduate student going for her PhD, and she began showing David around the lab and pulling out samples of their work.  She shared with him bits of pottery, and a collection of handmade nails she pulled from a recent dig in Montana, and David was engaging right back with her on her finds.  He was asking questions, and commenting on the artifacts in his confident way, showing he knew a thing or two about history and how these artifacts connected with others.  (Knowing this could take awhile, I sent Anna and Megan off to go explore the business school; I tried to fade into the walls as much as I could, to let the two of them talk.)

Ms. Victor showing David some pottery samples from a recent dig.

Ms. Victor was terrific: she gave David a lot to think about in terms of the field of archaeology and what the good programs are around the country that he should look into.  We learned a lot about the branches of the field that we'd never known before: for instance, a good general overview of anthropological archaeology would be found at Michigan, Michigan State, Berkeley, Syracuse, maybe Santa Clara; David should not apply to Boston University unless he only wanted to work in Europe for a career.  But if he wanted to study prehistoric archaeology, especially focused on Mesoamerican cultures (Inca, Aztec, etc.), then Arizona and Arizona State are the places to go.  And we'd never heard of "nautical archaeology," but I guess it makes sense: if the river's changed course and has now overrun the site you want to explore, you need to be scuba-certified and you need to know how to work underwater in the silt of a river or ocean bed.  And that's taught at Texas A&M, of all places.

She talked with him about careers in the field, and what each degree would allow him to do.  If all he wants to do is dig in the dirt, and work on a site as part of a team, then a bachelors will suffice; if he wants to be a project lead or work in "cultural resource management" (i.e., the people who go through before a freeway gets built, to make sure there's nothing there), then the MA is needed; and if he wants to explore his own interests and build his own program, then that's the PhD.

I think David added someone new to his fan club that day; on discovering he was "only" a sophomore, she twice commented how she was blown away at how well he carried himself in this professional encounter and how his passion for archaeology came through.  And by the end of their time together, he came away with two huge opportunities.  One was, she invited him to come down sometime, even on a weekend, and help her in the lab: cleaning, coding, labeling the artifacts, and learning what the lab experience is like.  And she also gave us a copy of a flyer for a summer dig that W&M undergraduates are doing in conjunction with Colonial Williamsburg.  She told him she knows the project director and she thought he'd be thrilled to have David maybe come down for a few days out of the 10-week project and gain some fieldwork experience too.

We both left there flying.  So let me see if I got this straight: a professional in David's chosen field took him seriously enough to have extended offers and opportunities for him to gain practical experience the summer before his junior year.  We also got about a half-dozen other colleges David needs to look into, to see whether they interest him; and, perhaps most importantly, he had such a positive, inspiring experience with his first contact with a college.

The whole day could not have gone any better; it truly felt God-blessed.  He commented later that there wasn't anything he didn't like about W&M, and so now he has something good to compare other colleges to.  And perhaps most importantly, he got to see what terrific experiences he could be getting into, and what it'll take for him to be admitted into that world.  Maybe this will help him focus and pour some more energy into studies and tests, to help get him positioned for all that he had the merest taste of that afternoon in the basement of Washington Hall.  Let the hunt begin!

Beginning the College Hunt, Part I

This past Friday, Anna and Megan Schipono and David and I went to the kids' first college tour experience, and it was probably just about everything I could have secretly hoped it would be.

When I began my college hunt, back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and great flocks of wild chickens darkened the skies, college tours were *maybe* the summer between sophomore and junior year, but certainly a spring-break-junior-year activity.  These days, and with this boy, it's better to start sooner.  One of his (now college-attending) Boy Scout friends had confided in me that when he was a sophomore, his folks took him on a tour, and it sharpened his desire: Yes, I really want that, and so I'd better start getting serious about studying in order to get it.  Can't hurt to get started, then.

The proto-archaeologist had become aware that William and Mary, down at Williamsburg, had an excellent archaeology/anthropology program on the colonial period (duh), so he asked to visit.  Unbeknownst to us, Megan had discovered their marketing program and also asked for a tour.  Which both sets of parents independently set up for the exact same day and hour during spring break.

After arriving and parking and lunch at the Cheese Shop, we walked onto campus and into the oldest part of campus, the iconic Wren Building (oldest extant academic building in America) dead ahead.  We explored that, then wandered through the old campus and onto the newer pieces, eventually discovering the marble floors of the business school.

Megan and David in front of the Wren Building

Our tour lasted a shade over two hours; 45 minutes of overview by the school in an auditorium at the student center, then off with our senior tour guide, Max, who walked us through many features of the campus.  We saw the cafeteria, the Crim Dell and learned of its curse, then saw the library, the chemistry building, and eventually over to a dorm room, before finishing with English lit and returning through the Wren Building's arched passageway.

Max leading the tour, with Megan, David, and Anna

At the conclusion, Max told a story about convocation: arriving freshmen have to endure a speech by the president in the oldest part of the campus, out where the kids had their picture taken.  Then the new freshmen walk through Wren Building to the growing sound of applause, and on reaching the other side, they find the entirety of the rest of the University there, all green and gold, clapping, high-fiving, welcoming them to W&M, and from that moment on, he said, "you are Tribe."  That really resonated with David, and I have to confess, with me too.

On parting, Max told us where to find the anthropology department, and we headed to the basement of Washington Building.  A class had just let out, and when we poked our head into the lab, the woman there called out, "Come on in and look around!"

That began an hour-and-a-half conversation I'm still processing.   (To Be Continued)