18 January 2010
Challenges on Connecticut Ave
(The Kennedy-Waren Complex, Photo by Washington Post)
It is MLK day, so you may be off. We are not, or better put, we will simulate working since none of the calls I need to make will be returned since the Government is taking a break to honor an insurrectionist against it.
That echoes the topics we romped through over the last few days. I was going to stun you with a detailed accounting of how the Schlesinger Report sparked the re-organization of the Intelligence Community, and how Rex had to deal with the dramatic reduction in funding, but I am too tired. It makes my head hurt. We can get to that tomorrow
We had an inauguration I know we have had an inauguration, too, though what happens in Richmond doesn't make much of a splash up here, regardless of the fact that we theoretically live in the same state. Things will be very different for you tomorrow, I assume, though most people around here are looking toward Massachusetts rather than down the I-95 corridor for portents.
I had a long-standing commitment to go to the DC Motorcycle Show down at the convention center yesterday, which was complicated by a sudden surprise invite to a baby shower. The former is always a hoot, and I go with my pal Phil, who rides a full dress Hog.
As to the latter, you can imagine my reaction, which for guys is normally sudden panic. The interesting thing was that the invite was sent by a glamorous New York author on behalf of a childless colleague of a certain age who I last heard from prior to an impending deployment to Afghanistan.
I sent a medium-priced gift from the registry at Babys R Us immediately to an address in the Midwest. Another curiosity of these times is that I have an account at that concern. Could there be something going on out there, an indication of the impact of the recession on discretionary entertainment dollars?
My friend has run an intellectual salon down in Adams-Morgan for years. I didn't make the soirees as often as I would have liked, but I only have so much rope in my locker and the back end of evening downtown is sometimes quite beyond me. I knew that I missed her, and one of the periodic worries of the day was how the war had treated her.
I awoke yesterday at the farm. The feral cat was upset with me yesterday and the alarm clock did not off as scheduled to get me launched Sunday morning to get back to town in the pelting gray rain. Accordingly, the Sunday edition of the story was a little darker than I would like, and my mind continued to turn over trivial affairs of life and death and love as I plowed the big police cruiser through the rain north toward the city.
How trivial the trials of my little world actually were would be made apparent soon enough.
Phil dropped me near the Zoo entrance and I walked up the stately courtyard to the Kennedy-Warren apartment complex. The building is a heroic survivor of the Aztec Art Deco style of 1931, and in its way is connected to Big Pink They tell me the Kennedy-Warren is one of the world’s most outstanding examples of Aztec Art Deco apartment architecture. It has been around since 1931, and has recently been extensively updated to restore its faded glory.
You cannot beat the location; it is immediately adjacent to the entrance to the Zoo, landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted, and it is only fitting that the building itself resides at the top of the list of Washington DC luxury apartments. The multi-colored speckling of the original bricks is an almost eerie quotation of the ones here at Big Pink; our founding Grand Dame Francis Freed resided just down Connecticut Ave at the Shoreham and must have been a frequent guest here.
The concierge desk is like something from a Fred Astaire film. The six-foot griffins, destroyed by lightning in the 1960s like so many other things, have been recast and replaced in their original locations. There are really cool aluminum accents that harmonize the exterior and interior of the grand new wing overlooking Rock Creek Park.
built our trail-blazing Continental-style high-rise building in 1964 resided not far away at the Shoreham Hotel all of her life in Washington.
You can see the resemblance between the Shoreham (now an Omni) and our building, which rose the year before the Kennedy-Warren, but shares the same sort of distinguished roster of guests. Lyndon Johnson lived at there in olden times, hatching his plots as Senate Majority Leader, along with a few dozen generals and admirals, in pre-Pentagon days, Congressmen galore and even conservative humorist P.J. O’Rourke.
Anyway, I walked up to the glass entrance with a white plastic bag and two trickle-chargers I had purchased at the motorcycle show to accommodate the constantly discharged batteries on the classic muscle pick-up truck (six years to antique plates!) and the Harley that sleeps in the garage.
I guess I fit the profile for a baby shower guest, though the doorman probably did not know I was actually carrying "Baby's First 12-Volt Charger" and not a receiving blanket or breast pump kit.
The venue was appropriate. My friend is a celebrity. You can find several articles about her on the net, some praising her application of anthropology to warfighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We met, in fact, when I was involved in a guerilla war against the Bush White House regarding their information operations strategy in the Muslim world in 2002. She went on to a very high profile career integrating the concept that there is a human terrain to be dealt with in military operations that must be recognized as equally important as the topographic lay of the land.
I have only a bogus Harvard certificate, not a real one like hers (she also went to Yale), in addition to a heritage of an early life spent on a Sausalito barge with her Flower-Power parents. I have not been profiled anywhere, with the possible exception of my ex's attorney's office. She has been in the New Yorker and Wall Street Journal.
Despite some fairly dramatic differences in background, we have a similar philosophical orientation. We met because of a shared belief in the fact that the government was seriously deficient in understanding what we were getting into after 9/11.
It was my position that you should have some knowledge of the people you deal with overseas, on the general principle that that you won't have to kill so many of them.
My friend took that premise a lot further. She made significant contributions to the Counter-insurgent doctrine of the Army, and has cast quite a long shadow through the corridors of the Command and Staff College out at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.
The shower was in one of the Kennedy-Warren's elegant private rooms on the first floor. I was dressed more for Harley-Davidson than for the elegant salon, all wood-paneled and sedate. The crowd was mostly female, and mostly dressed to the tone of the room, heels and hose, but I have been so disoriented of late that I did not feel out of place. I first saw my friend's childhood friend and glamorous New York author, beret and blonde, and was made immediately welcome regardless of how I looked.
I shrugged off my leather bomber jacket and threw my brown snap-brim down behind a delicate brocade-covered chair and poured a tall mimosa as my friend saw I was there. We embraced over her imposing belly and I started with the questions, which came in spurts over gifts and chatter among the guests.
Our New Yorker made an eloquent toast, announcing she was the father of the child, to general merriment, and that this baby was likely to emerge with a Rambo headscarf and gnaw off his own umbilical cord. I was knocked out, as always. She is a complete work of art.
There were a thousand questions bubbling in my mind. How had she found herself suddenly single? Did she know, flying with the Special Ops guys that she was in the family way? Of course. Where was she living now? Near Fort Leavenworth. She had moved herself out there after getting back from Theater, well along in the pregnancy.
Jesus.
An attractive lady with a wiry frame and alert eyes was taking detailed notes on the origin of the boxes filled with blankets, crib sheets, ear-and-nose siphons and milk storage devices.
I am a veteran of human gestation in two iterations, so I appreciate the value of these things to a new mother even if they are unsettling to the male psyche.
I had a chance to talk to the note-taker later. She is a compulsive athlete, figure skating and riding, which accounted for her physique. It might also have something to do with the last eight years in the theater of operations, living out of a bag, dealing with good and bad guys and listening to explosions in the night.
I eventually made it home and managed to get things sorted out before heading for bed. I took a full tab of the arthritis medicine to see if I could sleep right through the night. As it turned out, I must have been really tired, or maybe the jolt of how tough and unexpected life can really be did the trick.
I slept right through, and the hamster-wheel really has not got running yet this morning.
Dr. King confronted his fate with dignity. There are people all over who are confronting real challenge the same way. So, this MLK Day, I am going to thank my lucky stars.
Things could certainly be a lot more challenging, you know?
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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