Day 9

After a night of interrupted sleep due to back pain I got up very early and went out for a walk hoping to 'walk through the pain', but it was not to be. I spent time in the old neighborhood first experienced 15 years ago, south of Stanton Square NE and then walked over to Union Station where I once caught the Mark Local train for Baltimore every morning at 6:00 AM for my first job in this part of the country. Strangely little has changed. So, after enjoying the nostalgia of the moment I walked to the Mall and had the unpleasant realization that nothing opens until 10:00 (and I was there at 8:30). That being the case, for the next hour and a half I walked the mall and the monuments that are not dependent on schedule because they are always 'there' and available.

When the museums opened I was in line at the Museum of Natural History. I haven't visited here in several years and it was a real pleasure to revisit the various elaborate exhibit halls of fossils, geology, insects, human anatomy, mammals, meteors, and other arresting subjects. The building is SO nineteenth century - as is most of the Smithsonian - that that alone affords a museum like experience. When I finished there I went next door to the West Wing of the National Gallery of Art and spend some time with my favorite Rembrandt self-portrait. The big new exhibit at the museum is "The Art of Power", a very strange collection of images and artifacts that glorify warfare during the 16Th Century. The exhibit includes many equestrian figures in armour. Much of what is in the exhibit K and I had seen in Madrid a few years ago at the military museum connected to the Royal Palace - and it was boring even then. So I didn't linger.

Back home in time to meet K for lunch we walked over to Eastern Market and ate at a relatively new Salvadorian grill. We sat outside at a cluster of tables serving several new adjacent ethnic restaurants. At an adjoining table Julian Bond was having lunch. Bond and I are both from Nashville and only a couple of years different in age but I always think of him as much older since he accomplished so much so early - founding SNCC (The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee) when he was still at Morehouse College and then founding, with Morris Dees, the Southern Poverty Law Center - still a major force against white supremacist organizations and hate crimes. Currently he is Chairman of the NAACP and a professor at both the American University in DC and the University of Virginia.

Across the street at one of the picknick tables in front of Eastern Market, our newest Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor was holding court with a full gaggle of fresh faced law clerks, none of whom looked older than 12. Damn, I love this neighborhood.