It is Good Friday today, and with some minor chaos we will attend to a scheduled medical mystery of our own. It has been scheduled for weeks, so there is no spiritual surprise. Just minor confusion in automotive direction.

Holy Week was always a great one for walking in Washington. This season has turned, finally, and it is temperate on the city streets. The Cherry blossoms have passed, but other new shades remain in purple and alabaster hues. The Victorian row houses across the river in Kalaroma and Dupont are dotted with yellow in the little gardens beside their steep wrought-iron rails and concrete steps.

A few blocks from the Bus Station where we once worked is Ford’s Theater, where President Lincoln was murdered on Good Friday one hundred and fifty-eight years ago. The story of that day is not as fresh as it once was. In Jerusalem, there has been holy week trouble. The trouble includes elements of Ramadan, Passover and crucification amid civic disturbance.

We were at the Circle a few years ago when walking was still a popular thing. We were near the statue of Admiral Dupont, and had the choice of taking the Metro or walking back to the office or strolling south into the commercial district to get back to the office. We chose to walk, and wander through the Mayflower Hotel and pretend we were conventioneers.

The brass fixtures gleamed on the white marble floors of the Grand Concourse, and we fit right in with our badges on lanyards around our necks. We were not challenged when we used the restrooms and not asked about our pronouns. We enjoyed the snowy white hand-towels.

Emerging from the rear entrance, across the street from the bronze wolves that flank the entrance to the Defenders of Wildlife Building, there were banners advertising a new exhibition at the National Geographic Society Headquarters.

Given the choice between being early for a conference call, and seeing something new, we crossed the street and went north up the block to the Geographic. The Kimonos of the last authentic Geisha were on display, and a gallery featuring pages from the original Gospel of Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Christ the King.

It was the middle afternoon, and there was no line. We were able to lean over the display cases and look at pages frozen in glass plates, the characters on the brown pages still legible after nearly two millennia. They were written, according to the Geographic, as far from the Crucifixion as we were from the murder of President Lincoln.

There is controversy about the Gospel, of course, though that week it seemed to be about ownership, rather than provenance. The story told by the betrayer of Christ appears to be that the treachery was actually an inside job, a tactic to deliver the Redeemer to the hands of his enemies to in order to reveal a higher truth. The theme seems more familiar this year than in the past and echoes some of our recent conflict.

The exhibit shared a confidence between the Son of God and a beloved disciple. That was the way this good day appeared only fifteen years ago. For this observance, we have decided to go to the Doctor and present our blood for routine periodic examination. That is a good thing on a good day. We intend to honor the weekend days that follow as the culmination of a week devoted to religious memories.

There are other aspects of the holiday season that represent the big change. We are going to celebrate in the way we always have. It is a little more comfortable that way for the Old Salts, you know?

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