Virginia Is For Families

We turned the heat off before leaving Friday evening for northern Virginia.  And now as we return the house is cool.  It feels good.  The sheets are cool and the blankets do their work.  I set the thermostat to 68 degrees tonight but still hope to enjoy the autumn air.  It was 39 degrees outside when we awoke this morning near the mountains of West Virginia.

It was a lovely weekend except that Beth was sick and stayed in bed while we went to the DC zoo.  I took some photos of some incredible animals today.  But then I forgot the camera when we returned to Richmond.   The children loved the zoo and were so excited about all the different creatures.  The pandas were wrestling and talking at the same time.  I had never heard a panda growl before.   One of them pretty much wanted to rest but the other one wouldn’t stop.  It was a noisy affair.

The cool water glistened around the seals as they effortlessly flew through the water.  And I began to appreciate the photogenic qualities of lizards.  I wish I could show you how beautiful they are but it will have to wait until someone sends me my memory card.

Very funny Halloween scenes were set up all over the zoo.  Skeletons dressed in different outfits.  I took photos of many of them and plan to put together a StumbleUpon  post this week.  Everybody who stumbles it in the first 48 hrs will get a link to one of their fine posts from here.

If the memory card arrives.  How can you be so dumb and  leave your camera on the kitchen chair?  I don’t know!  We had a lovely dinner last night at The Dock.   Apparently the new wave of house building in various places includes many houses plus a downtown area of stores and even a movie theater or two.  They  sell apartments above the stores to folks who (I guess) just want to be near other people all the time.

All the shops are quaintly built and the houses are built on streets that curve.  There are no straight streets anywhere.  And the homes are full of curves too.  The outside is rectangular of course.  But inside you find curved staircases and passageways.

The houses look at each other from angles.  Last night someone was showing a movie outside  on the side of their house.  A fire was burning  too.  There are neighborhood playgrounds and schools.  They are building “towns” along the freeways that bring bumper to bumper traffic every morning to DC.  In the towns of an earlier century everyone would walk or drive downtown to work.  Now they leave the towns and journey to the city.

My son-in-law travels one or two hours to work depending on the traffic.  Sometimes he has conference calls in his car with people in New York while traveling to his office near the White House.  His car is his office.

If you were walking downtown to your office in 1925 you probably would never imagine how things would be eighty years later.

But on Saturday afternoon the boys and their parents and sisters go down to the baseball diamond just a few miles away and play ball.  For a few hours things are just the same as they were many years ago.

We can say things are better.  Or we can say they are worse.  But we can also say with some certainty that these mothers will not die in childbirth and their children will not contract polio.  We can say that they will learn that ALL their friends are created equal and their new president may be black.  We can say that the crazy uncle won’t get away with so many things.  And if they happen to have a chemical imbalance it will be treated.

And as they grow the children will have the world at their fingertips as they use the internet in school and learn about other children around the world.

Also their parents and grandparents will love them just as they did decades ago.  And work to provide what they hope will be the best for them in all things and for many years to come.

More writing

http://davidnotes.com/2008/09/03/wednesday-evening-henry-miller/