It was going to be a nice day. As I jogged around the cart path on the 18th green of the post golf course, I could see the sun beginning to just come into view on the eastern horizon. At this time of the morning most people were still in bed as was Maribeth when I quietly slipped out of my BOQ room a half hour ago. I'm not sure what it is about running, but I seem to do my best thinking then. Maybe it has something to do with getting blood to the brain, but in any event I was planning our day.
I knew Maribeth was looking forward to touring Washington, as was I, but Washington is a big city with lots of interesting places. I had visited some of them as a child when my father had been stationed at Bolling AFB in the city, but I only vaguely remembered some, and others had sprung up in the intervening years, especially the Smithsonian. Since it appeared we were going to have good weather, that was my choice for the day.
I was disappointed when I returned, that no smell of brewing coffee greeted me when I got back to the BOQ as had happened the previous morning. Instead I heard the shower running. It had been cold enough that I hadn't broken much of a sweat, but there was enough that it needed to be washed off. Maribeth was shampooing her abundant tresses when I slipped in behind her and kissed her on her neck as I wrapped my arms around her waist. She gave me a contented "mmmmm" and acted for all the world like I had been expected.
Maribeth turned around, letting her hair fall to her back and her soapy hands were covering my ears and her wet lips found my sweaty ones. It was a delightful good morning kiss. My hands were busy tracing the geography of her curves from the swell of her hips up to and very much including the mounds of her breasts which I cupped and weighed in my hands as we kissed. She asked, "Nice run?" I nodded an affirmative and told her that it seemed we would have a good day to get out and about.
As always, our mutual showers were mostly grabbing and fondling sessions interspersed with laughable efforts to actually get clean in the traditional manner, but I suspected that perhaps the result might be just as good as hands and fingers covered and probed every inch of both of our bodies. Before we lost all of our hot water, I did make a semi-serious attempt to help Maribeth finish washing her hair.
I knew that when we finished, Maribeth would be at least twenty minutes with the hair dryer, so I quickly dressed and started breakfast. As usual, I opted for coffee and egg sandwiches. By the time that was done, Maribeth had appeared in her silk robe and I spent ten minutes or so explaining my rough plan for the day. As always, Maribeth was happy to follow my lead when it came to such things, but since I was on my own turf, so to speak, it was kind of expected.
The Smithsonian opened at nine, but some of the places I wanted to show Maribeth, like the Lincoln Memorial, really were open all the time, so I suggested we get an early start. While that was generally a good idea, it also put us in the teeth of the morning commuter traffic which we discovered as soon as we turned onto the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. I turned to Maribeth and observed that there wasn't anything quite as frustrating as driving a high powered sports car in stop and go traffic. We settled down for a long slog.
Most of the places I was planning to go are pretty concentrated around the Capitol Mall, but the Mall itself is huge. Fortunately there's a bus line that does a continual circuit and for $2 apiece we could ride all day so that's what we opted to do. As I had observed earlier the sun was out in a cloudless sky and it was warming up rapidly. It probably wouldn't reach the 50's but it would be close, so with no wind to speak of, it was quite pleasant for a December morning.
We started at the Lincoln Memorial. I vividly remembered a visit to this place when I was about ten years old. Located at the western end of the Mall it backed up to the Potomac River but from the front steps you had a magnificent view all the way past the Washington Monument to the Capitol dome two and a half miles away. Martin Luther King had given a speech on these very steps two years previously and the crowd had filled the spaces on both sides of the reflecting pool for a mile on both sides. The theme of the speech had been, "I Have a Dream."
Inside the white marble memorial was a 22' high statue of a seated Lincoln and the two side walls were excerpts from two of his speeches. I mentioned to Maribeth that I had been told that before the memorial had been built that there was a big controversy about it being built like a Greek temple, since Lincoln himself had always been portrayed as a humble man. Some thought a log cabin motif would have been more appropriate. As we looked around at the magnificent structure, Maribeth commented, "No way."
The buses circle the Mall in a clockwise direction, so our next stop would be the newly constructed Smithsonian Museum of American History and Technology. As we boarded the bus I looked again toward the Washington Monument and as I did, my gaze traversed an open area that unbeknownst to me at the time, would come to be quite significant in my life. Seventeen years later it would become the site of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and I would know some of the names that would be engraved there.
I had never been to this particular museum since it had only opened the year before. It was a huge four story modern marble building quite different from most government buildings nearby which were all Greek revival architecture. Just inside the front door we encountered the three gems of the exhibition. On the facing wall was the fifteen star flag that had flown over Ft. McHenry. The actual "star spangled banner." Suspended from the ceiling were two famous airplanes; On the left was the original Wright Brothers Flyer from Kitty Hawk and on the right was the "Spirit of St. Louis," which Charles Lindbergh had flown solo over the Atlantic in 1927. As we glanced from left to right it was hard to believe that only 25 years separated the two planes.
The museum was organized by technology, so one section was devoted to communication, another to transportation etc. As we walked through the various exhibits, Maribeth impressed me in a couple of ways; First, she was always curious and we stopped to read a lot of the information cards, much more than I observed others doing, and secondly, it turned out that she already knew quite a bit.
When I was young my parents had invested in a set of encyclopedias which my brother and I totally devoured in succeeding years. I knew that when it came to trivia, I was well armed, but it was a pleasant surprise to discover that Maribeth was too.
We had spent a couple of hours when hunger began to rear its ugly head. We had seen a sign that the museum had a cafeteria on the ground level and with no other obvious options, we headed there. It turned out that even the cafeteria was stocked with exhibits, perhaps the most striking being a huge steam locomotive located against the museum's side windows. It was, by far, the largest one I had ever seen. The engine itself was about seventy feet long with a coal car that had to have been another forty feet in length. The table we chose was only a few feet away.
Whenever I see something like this locomotive that impresses me, I always start taking the pieces apart in my mind; the large brass bell, the huge wheels, or the massive drive shaft connecting them together. This ultimately leads to considering things like the foundry that produced them and the methods used, then onto the ore's and how they're mined and transported and so on. Maribeth caught me in the middle of this process chain and her question, "what are you thinking?" snapped me back to our little table.
"I was thinking about how everything is connected," I replied, and summarized my recent thoughts for her benefit. "In order for something like that to be created," I said, nodding in the direction of the locomotive, "it requires the efforts of thousands of people who will never know what the end result of their day's labors will be. The miner in the Mesabi iron mines isn't necessarily thinking that he's an important link in a chain of events that results in the biggest locomotive in the world."
Maribeth's eyes met mine, and there was a long pause while we both thought about what I had just said. Then her eyes dropped and she whispered, maybe just to herself - I couldn't be sure, "Like ducks swimming on a pond, never knowing where the ripples they make go." I thought I was observing an "ah-ha moment," but Maribeth chose not to elaborate and when she got up and put our dirty silverware and plates back on the tray, I sensed that the moment had passed. There was something there, but it must lay deep...at a level our relationship had not yet reached.
I looked at my watch and found that it was already 3:30 and I realized how naive I had been to expect we could see everything I wanted to show Maribeth in just one day. All the federal buildings would close at 5 pm, but I definitely wanted her to see the Capitol before we left today. The bus passed the Museum of Natural History, the Archives, where the original Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were on display, and the National Gallery of Art before we arrived at the Capitol.
The inside of the rotunda gave one a feeling of hanging in infinite space. From the floor, there was a good hundred feet to the top of the dome. Huge paintings of great historical events surrounded the walls at our level and marble sculptures, columns and buttresses filled the spaces in between. We walked through the statue gallery which once had been the original seat of the House of Representatives which connected to the new site. Over 400 desks, one for each representative filled the floor and the podium where Franklin Roosevelt had called for a declaration of war against Japan still stood. The House was not in session, so Maribeth and I stood and stared for long minutes until I took her hand and gently led her away.
By the time we had found the car and began navigating the one way streets through Washington, the sun was starting to set and we both were realizing how tiring just walking around all day seemed to be. Maribeth said her feet hurt and I said that I would massage them when we got home. She said it was a promise she intended that I keep. The traffic was terrible and it was stop and go all the way back to Ft. Meade. Since we had eaten lunch so late, neither of us was particularly hungry, so I decided that I'd figure out what to do when the time came.
When we got back to the BOQ, Maribeth kissed me as soon as the door closed and told me for about the fifth time how much she enjoyed the day. Remembering my promise though, I sat her in a chair and went to the bathroom returning with a bottle of baby oil and four towels. Maribeth looked at the bottle and asked, "why do you have baby oil?" I chuckled and said, "lube." It took her a second to figure out what that meant before she just said, "oooh, I see."
