… UD was approached by a man in line ahead of her who said Ma’am I’ve got the last of the shade up here and I want to switch places with you so that you can have it. UD gratefully accepted his offer and reflected, as she glanced at his MAGA hat (she’d overheard that he was visiting from Tulsa and was here for the festivities on the Mall), that it’s always crude and stupid to perceive other people in broad ideological terms. Leaving your little house in an affluent lefty bubble in ‘thesda and heading into the sweltering city means encountering the actuality of individuals. “Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath,” said Saul Bellow, and for UD you need the bath because money and technology and group-think make it easy to remove yourself altogether from the human story, and that removal really has to be resisted if you want to go on being human.

Today however UD was firmly within her tribe, putting out more and more beach chairs at the end of her driveway so that her Garrett Park neighbors could watch our little parade (theme this year: Garrett Park is an Arboretum) on yet another sweltering afternoon. By the time Mr UD stood up to read excerpts from the Declaration of Independence, a crowd had gathered to join us as we saluted, a few minutes later, the parade marshal, 93 year old Barbara Shidler, with whom UD‘s mother gardened and landscaped and helped establish the arboretum (scroll down to Mitzi Rapp).

Love of country; love of town. The day inspires.

It’s one day before the Trumptacular, and as UD took a long hot walk from Union Station to the Natural History Museum, she heard tomorrow’s National Anthem singer rehearse the piece (UD sang along).

… as in “Sierra Tucson is the best residential depression treatment center,” but UD has long used the phrase to name something she noticed – perhaps felt is better – years ago, on visiting the vast house of some relatives, a married couple. Like UD, they grew up in middle class Jewish Baltimore and every year when young attended messy noisy happy jam-packed seders in narrow city row houses where cheap wine freely flowed among children and adults.

Having made it, her relatives now floated in a house whose high-ceilinged dining room sat forty people who never materialized, and whose cellared wine lay stacked as in an above-ground cemetery. They knew their neighbors (acres away in a treeless field) only in the territorial way of worrying about whether these people’s extensive lawn projects impinged on their own extensive lawn projects (recall Rand Paul’s serious injuries when one of his neighbors attacked him in a roiling dispute over grass clippings).

Home is so sad, wrote Philip Larkin; but in this poem he’s describing the sadness of having tried but failed to create a comfortable and meaningful domestic space – which is to say, having tried to make a happy life. The house started as

A joyous shot at how things ought to be,

Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:

Look at the pictures and the cutlery.

The music in the piano stool. That vase.

The pathos of Larkin’s house lies in the joyous shot at beauty and depth it obviously tried to be, if you look at its carefully and lovingly chosen pictures and music and vases. The cold pastoral of my relatives’ house lay in it having been conceived and elaborated as pure status display.

UD thought back on that house when she read Robert Shiller on the bohemoth waste of the big house. Shiller understands that “[h]aving a big house is a symbol of success, and people want to look successful,” but, as another finance person, Ellen Weber, notes in the same article, megamcmansions are “ludicrous.” Both she and Shiller are appalled not only at the economic stupidity of this sort of investment (many houses in my local megamcmansion region, Potomac, Maryland, are going begging; and I guess it’s tough all over) but at all the dead air inside it. Weber:

[F]amilies are shrinking. … More and more of our stuff is stored electronically; we should need less storage for it. There’s also a tendency to buy houses with big yards that most people do not use but end up spending lots of money paying someone else to mow and maintain.

Shiller:

[W]e don’t need elaborate kitchens, because we have all kinds of delivery services for food. And maybe you don’t need a workshop in your basement, either. You used to have a filing cabinet for your tax information, but now it’s all electronic, so you don’t need that, either. And bookshelves, for people who read a lot. We have electronic books now, so we don’t need bookshelves anymore.

From another article on the subject:

[M]edian house size has increased by some 1,000 square feet over the past 50 years. At the same time, the average size of the household has fallen as people have fewer kids than in earlier generations, [Wharton real estate professor Benjamin Keys note[s]. “For the houses that don’t fit the families, the prices are going to have to fall.” Add[s] [Dowell Myers, a public policy professor]: “The millennials seem to have a taste for living more sparsely. They don’t want as much furniture. They don’t want as much space.”

Dead space, and depressed people. If you listen, you can hear them singing: Is that all there is?

Seen on today’s early morning pick up trash walk. UD thought she’d have plenty to pick up – Saturday was insane with activity all over town – but the town crew must have swept through late yesterday, because the streets were frustratingly pristine. She did collect one half-full bottle (calorie free health drink, natch) in Wells Park, and a black plastic fork in front of the tennis courts, but that was it.

UD also lays some of the blame on fellow Garrett Parkers, who, all day long every day, do exactly what UD does.

… in UD’s back garden. Photo: Frances Eby.

… in The Importance of Being Earnest.

… has placed a flamboyance of flamingos in Garrett Park’s Porcupine Woods.

As seen on UD‘s morning walk. She’s back from Harpers Ferry, having taken the MARC train to get there and the Amtrak from Chicago (an hour late) to get back.

It’s an insanely busy Saturday in town – there’s the farmer’s market, a plant swap (UD has nothing to swap, but would like to take, if they’ll let her), yard sales everywhere, etc. If you’re local, it’s a good day to see GP.

Trying to get there via the MARC train that stops right by UD’s house. We’ll see if this works. Will try to blog from there.

This is the one for my mother, Mitzi Rapp, a historian.

Variations.