Walking in D.C. (With My Feet Two Inches Off the Ground)

My feet hurt.

I've just returned from my fourth trip (in 25 years) to Washington D.C. There is a LOT to see in D.C., all built of limestone, marble and bronze, and scattered over a "pedestrian" area roughly the size of Montana. Predictably, hotels are not cheap here so the discerning tourist stays in Maryland or Virginia and takes the metro in to sightsee. The metro system covers more than 100 miles and has more escalators (most of them inexplicably stationary) than any other transit system in the world and two of the longest in the world to boot.

I went with two friends--one who'd never been to D.C. and another who had been only once. I'll call them Patience and Prudence. Patience has lost 40 pounds this last year and works out more than she eats. Prudence has lost 60 pounds in the last two years and cannot stand still due (she claims) to back problems.

My guess is that over the course of the five days in D.C., I walked 120 miles and climbed two million stairs. We would have walked more but I convinced Patience and Prudence to wait for the next metro train instead of starting down the track to get a headstart. I prudently pointed out to Patience that one of the rails had a small electric charge in it that might make her hair curl. I patiently pointed out to Prudence that we could always make up for the four minutes "standing around doing nothing" while we waited for the next train by getting off a stop earlier and walking further to our destination.

While my knees held up very well, my calves and feet did not. As I lay on my sofa bed in our hotel "suite" (I stupidly volunteered to take the bad bed due to Prudence's bad back and Patience's offer to compensate me financially), my calves would alternately tense up then burn like fire. By day four, I had a blister on my fourth toe approximately the size of my...fourth toe. It was so large that the Post Office gave it its own ZIP code and Jefferson County decided to tax it as personal property.

Before this trip, I liked escalators. They represent a chance to rest your weary feet, to take an easy ride to the surface. But neither Prudence nor Patience believed in standing on an escalator. They, instead, walked up (or down) them, perhaps to get to their destination first, fighting to be the first through the metal detector to get into the Smithsonian, the Capitol, the Washington Monument or the public restrooms.

Patience and Prudence did have an altercation over the use of cell phones in certain areas where respect was required, and I must admit I lost my cool once as we tried to find the hotel at 10 p.m. in a cold rain after emerging from the metro to a street corner we'd never before seen while dragging our suitcases and looking at a piss-poor street map. I also discovered that Patience and Prudence did not want to watch "Little Couple," "18 Kids and Counting," "Jon and Kate Plus Eight" or "Amazing Spider Women" (about Siamese twins). Thank God I had my own TV in the hotel...

Stuff Mom Kept

My mom was the most organized person--if not in the world, at least in the greater-St Louis metro area. I say "was" not because she's no longer with us, but because she has precious little to organize these days as she sinks further into dementia. When it came time to clear out her house and put it on the market, I tasked myself with going through 40 years of accumulation and sorting it out into piles for my siblings, piles for Good Will and piles for Mr. Trashman.

Walking through her house, one would never ever in a million years guess that she was a pack rat. Her house was as far from one of those fascinating specimens profiled on "The Hoarder" TV show....you know....the ones with little narrow pathways snaking through all the rooms...where people sleep on portions of the bed because the rest if full of, well, stuff. No, Mom's house was clean and organized. You didn't get to the stuff until you began to open drawers and cabinets - all neatly organized, mind you, but full.

Various hardy friends helped me with the task of sorting through everything, room by room. Amazingly, none seemed too put off by the accumulation. Aside from the mice detritus and one mouse mummy, the stuff was clean.

On Mom's closet shelf I found pieces of hangars. She had those plastic kind with the swivel hooks. I am sure they could have been fixed, but certainly could have been replaced more quickly and economically than the time and effort it would take to repair them.

Carefully wrapped in boxes labeled "broken cut glass bowl" and "broken ornament" and "broken Hummel" were....broken items. As she had plenty of intact bowls, ornaments and Hummels, these items went to Mr. Trashman.

One of my favorite finds was a drawer full of shoulder pads removed from blouses and sweaters. Mom apparently thought her shoulders were just fine without them, but could not bear to throw them away.

Sorting through the boxes of greeting cards and correspondence was the most time consuming and heart-wrenching. Taking the time to do it, however, gave me a glimpse into lives I had long forgotten. I never knew that Mom's best friend, Betty Fox, had a baby that only lived 12 hours. Or that Mom's miscarriage was between Glenn and Anne, not Ned and Glenn. I found a letter Dad had written to his best friend, Gus, right after the drunk driver hit our house and sent him into congestive heart failure. It happened when my first son was an infant. It was full of his typical humor, bragging that Ryan (my son) was already having to carry a baseball bat around to keep the girls off and that his (Dad's) arm was still in a sling from where Mom grabbed him and pushed him down the stairs at the hospital so she'd be the first one to hold baby Ryan, not him. I sent the letter to Gus. What a blast from the past to get a letter from your friend that died 20 years ago...

Ah, but lest I fall into melancholy, let's return to Mom's stuff.

As the oldest niece and the caretaker of her elderly spinster aunts, Mom inherited photos. Boxes of them. BIG boxes of them. And slides. LOTS of slides. I sent many of those out to her cousins found on Facebook, and have reconnected with some interesting people and through them have discovered that my great-aunts (three of those unmarried spinsters) had a wild side I never suspected.

And Uniforms!!! She must have thought we'd need them again... In a wooden trunk my dad made were our grade school and high school uniforms, team uniforms, team jackets and yes, even Glenn's McDonalds uniform.

Baby quilts....baby clothes handmade by my Grandmother....little miniature aprons Marian and I wore when we helped maked "pie" (pie crust sprinkled with cinamon and sugar)...Mom's wedding dress (moth eaten and stained), those awful matching green velvet dresses made from one of the bridesmaid dresses from my Mom's wedding for Marian and me (the ones with the terrible scratchy collars), Dad's briefcase (with some cross country team photos in it that had never been delivered to the guys' who ordered them)...

Worst of all were the many items packed away, carefully labeled with the date received and the giver's name. Christmas presents, birthday presents, little knick-knacks, decorative items. Things she didn't need but stored (neatly) nonetheless.

My trip through memory lane took four nearly five months.

I've been going through my own stuff ever since. I am 95% certain my own kids will never take that time to do it, so I may as well relive the memories now.

Glenn is Getting Married

Having had the pleasure of Glenn and Heather's company at dinner this evening (and having been inspired by my sister-in-law-to-be to try blogging), I find it only logical to comment on their upcoming nuptials.

Not their nuptials in April, but their follow-up ceremony in Cedar Hill tentatively planned for June.

Heather said she'd go for anything that means she gets to wear the dress twice. So, to accommodate my Mom, whose dementia just doesn't allow the confusion of overnight travel, we're going to hold a "mock" ceremony at my house sometime after the "real" wedding.

My friend Pam is writing the vows for this special ceremony. Look for the words "sex," "tuna can," "bodacious," " shagadelic," and "smelly farts" to appear somewhere in this portion of the event.

Kathleen has volunteered to play taps on the trumpet. Actually, I asked for "Ode to Joy" but she feels more comfortable with taps.

There will be rice. Whole-grain, of course.

We're hiring an actor to stand up when the "minister" says "Is there anyone here who knows of any reason this couple should not be joined in holy matrimony?" No decision yet on what the reason will be, but there many be some insinuation that 1) Glenn is still married to his first wife or 2) Glenn is not really a man.

The couple will exchange vows in front of our garden pond. My nephew Chris might accidentally plug in the pond fountain during the event. It may or may not be died red to match the bridesmaid dresses.

Someone suggested that a hot air balloon land in the yard during the ceremony. Yeah...

Pam suggested we release white doves. Kathleen says those are expensive. So Pam is going to catch 100 songbirds and butterflies before the ceremony and release them afterward.

The traditional Kammerer photo shoot will take place immediately following the ceremony. Suggested poses include Glenn and Heather, Glenn and Heather with Mom, Glenn and Heather with Ringo and Fargo, Glenn and Heather with all five cats, Glenn trying to get the hairball off of Heather's dress, Heather using the lint roller to get the cat hair off Glenn's suit, Glenn and Heather burning Kathleen's office chair and Danny pouting because he has to attend the ceremony and can't play video games.

The tentative menu for the feast includes microburgers, Texas Potatoes, chocolate chocolate chip cookies, spaghetti, little Caesar's pizza and crazy bread and Mom's green jello salad.

There will be cake.

To cap off the evening, Heather will mount Keith's old motorcycle and ride off into the sunset with Glenn in the sidecar.

Marian will not be able to attend as she will be at the lake.

Cleaning the Garage

I'm from a family of five closely spaced siblings, product of parents who married "late in life" (Dad was 29 and Mom 30) and felt the need to move fast to have the six children they had planned. By the time #4 (Glenn) was a year old in 1966, they decided that four was a very good number. Anne (#5...she turns 40 tomorrow) begged to differ, and put in her appearance shortly before #1's 9th birthday. The result was five children becoming teenagers just as Mom hit menopause. To give Mom some needed relief, Dad devised cruel torture called "Cleaning the Garage."

The garage was a two-car space with a single door that weighed as much as the old Chevy wagon that never ever saw the inside of the garage. Stored in this edifice were sleds, bikes, wooden go-carts, Glenn's Big Wheel (he rode it until he was 17), Anne's Inch Worm (we just threw it out in May), a straw archery target from the junior high school where Dad was the PE coach, bats, baseballs, softballs, tennis balls, tennis raquets, basketballs, card table chairs, trash cans, an aluminum row boat (eventually tied up to the rafters as a safe place for the cat to have kittens), the riding lawn mower from Uncle Jim that on its best day achieved a speed of 2 mph and every left-over building supply from every odd job Dad picked up after school and in the summer.

It was crowded. It was disorganized. There was cat poop and cat pee in very unexpected places. And Mom dreamed....dreamed....of getting a car in there. As if!

So, on Garage Cleaning Day, we all grudgingly slunk out to the garage and cleaned it. Dad officiated. Anne usually got out of it and rode her Inch Worm up and down the sidewalk or sold leaves door to door around the neighborhood with Chrissy from next door.

The operation was quite simple.

First, we took everything that wasn't nailed down out of the garage and put it in the driveway.

Then we swept the garage (everyone wanted to be the sweeper).

Then we put it all back in again...neatly.

Voila! Clean Garage!

I have a two-car garage now. Until we recently sold my Mom's house and had to empty it pretty quickly, I could get two cars in it. I also don't have orange wallpaper in my bedroom, but that's another story.