It Was Pink
March 31 2023
Washington D.C.’s cherry blossoms had peaked a week earlier and Weather.com predicted wind and rain for the following evening. We were happy, then, when even in darkness, we could see that the trees lining the Tidal Basin were still covered in blossoms. Riding in the Uber from BWI Airport to our Airbnb in Georgetown, we saw the LED lights of construction traffic message boards that informed visitors of street closures and instructed where to park. Tour buses lined the streets. It was all cherry blossoms all the time. We had not missed it.
The next day–the first real day of our vacation–Walt had a deposition in the early afternoon, so I set out alone in search of the celebrated, but short-lived, cherry blossoms. Walking solo, I had the luxury of dawdling. When my husband has an appointed destination in the city, he steers me through foot traffic alternately by my elbow or shoulder as though we were rushing to pick up free tickets to the resurrection of Tom Petty or possibly a limited give-away for time-travel to our youth. But it was my first day in the city and I was free to experience it my way.
I photographed a homeless guy in front of the Four Seasons who had haphazardly stretched the entangled flags of the U.S., Israel, and China across a good twenty feet of bridge railing beside the luxury hotel.
A block or two later, I saw a church with a pair of troubling bronze relief doors. The top of the left door portrayed Jesus, perhaps, though in an unfamiliar pose–standing next to an upright cross and holding it as if it were a surfboard. Beneath, on the same door, an angel flew down toward three guys on some boulders. One was holding a rock and another, who I thought at first was headless, was holding his hands above his head so all you could see was his beard. The angel was holding some sort of head wear with ribbons fluttering in a turbulent sky. On the right door, another angel was headed south through a meteor shower with a big feather in his hand, which he extended to a guy kneeling below. The man wore his hair in an apparent manbun up top. The doors are shockingly grizzly, like they belong down in Oaxaca and not in our nation’s capital. I took a photo so I could remember to ask my friend Susan what it all means. She has a doctorate in Divinity.
I decided instead to Google it. The doors tell the story of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who, as he was being stoned to death, forgave his attackers and saw a vision of Jesus standing with his cross. Martyrs are often portrayed with a palm branch, says the online Oracle, and so it must be that the angel on the right is reaching down with a palm branch and not a feather. I guess this makes slightly more sense in that if someone was going to rescue you from imminent death, you’d have more confidence grabbing onto a branch, even if it’s a palm frond, rather than a feather. My macabre fascination with these particular doors on a Catholic church seems fitting, given that yesterday was Palm Sunday, a day we celebrated with palm fronds in Florida when I was a child, in anticipation of the following Sunday, when we’d get a basketful of waxy chocolate. We didn’t know any better, so it was a treat.
A bit further down Pennsylvania Avenue, I stumbled upon the statue of a literal horse’s ass up on a pedestal adorned on either side by formal beds of tulip soldiers standing at attention in full regalia of red, orange, and yellow. Yes, it’s true, it was just the back end of our nation’s first president, George Washington, atop his horse in the center of Washington Circle. I added more photos to the gallery on my phone and turned south onto 23rd Street NW.
Across the street I saw the Tompkins Hall of Engineering at George Washington University. My poorly framed photo of the plain-faced gray structure reminds me that nothing engineered there ever would be more spectacular than, just north of the entrance, a small red bud tree whose gangly limbs were sheathed in small, tightly woven blooms of fuchsia pink.
After a few minutes, I left the GW campus behind me, never wishing for a minute that I had chosen to attend law school there as opposed to the University of Texas in Austin, where I went instead. Still, I did wonder what kind of government lawyer I would have become. And as I am pondering this thought, I am somehow compelled to stop in my tracks and describe the last few hundred calories I ingested just this minute, as I’m writing this later in the afternoon, back in the Airbnb.(I might have pretended that I had eaten this about-to-be-described delight from a paper bag during my walk to see the cherry blossoms, just like an American. You weren’t there and I will forget. But I’m new to this writing endeavor and still feel bound by some degree of truth-telling.)I just bit into a sweet sandwich of two soft ginger cookies mortared together with tart lemon buttercream filling and glistening all around with a crunchy coating of coarse cane sugar. It is the culinary equivalent of that pink tree in front of the gray engineering building. Thank you, Baked & Wired on Thomas Jefferson in Georgetown.
Lest you think this account to be utterly without direction, we will at once return from the snack digression to my perambulation of 23rd Street NW. In at least two dozen trips to Washington, I had never seen, or perhaps never noticed, the Pan American Health Organization building–really two buildings, one held gently by the other, sort of like an egg in a nest. I saw the low building first. It’s short and drum-shaped, dark underneath with narrow rows of light-colored vertical zigzags reaching up its walls. Maybe like a chubby baby with arms outstretched and legs kicking and crazy hair. Curving behind the low building is the high one, a light and elegant tall fortress of strong, straight parallel lines, standing sentry. It is a health organization building, after all, so why not picture those lines as dozens of George Clooneys, a la ER, standing side-by-side in starched white lab coats? I didn’t get a single good photo of that place, but here’s my shout out to Architect Román Fresnedo Siri of Uruguay who designed the mid-century marvel back in the 1960s.
I was still headed south toward the Lincoln Memorial to see the cherry blossoms. I was walking behind a young woman in a camouflage uniform wearing a boot cast on her right foot. We approached alight on 23rd where the street intersects with a driveway into a federal compound. A jocular man in a guard’s uniform stepped forward, smiling, and politely asked the young soldier in front of me to wait while a car on 23rd turned left to enter the compound. A jackass in a large truck behind the vehicle honked angrily and scowled as he steered his outsized tires around the turning car, no doubt in a hurry to conduct very important business else where in the District. As the soldier and I crossed the driveway, I noticed that the federal compound into which the car was headed was the U.S. Institute of Peace. I laughed out loud.
On the other side of the driveway, I stopped to write in my notebook so I wouldn’t forget. A woman approached and said, “I like your scarf.” I thanked her and as she walked past, she added, “And your jeans. I like your jeans too.” I called out to her, “Come back! You are welcome to stay and give me more compliments!” We both laughed and she went on ahead while I finished jotting down my notes. At the next intersection, she stood in front of me while we waited for the light to change. I noticed then that her hair was braided in vertical rows of zigzags, like the Pan American Health building I’d just seen. A gust of wind came up and pink petals from the cherry blossoms scattered down across the sidewalk. The trees were just ahead, all laden with heavy basketsful of soft pink blossoms that spilled onto the path around the basin. Everywhere, it was pink.
