Having jammed my black leather backpack full of stuff (jacket, dress, shoes, umbrella, laptop), and having hidden the garbage bin from the dog, UD is off, on a partially sunny day, to Baltimore. She will walk to the Grosvenor metro station unless

1. she is stopped by a neighbor in a car who insists on driving her; or
2. she gets to Strathmore Avenue just in time to catch the Ride-On bus.

Amazingly, after chatting with the town maintenance man (subject: the spring weather, and how it’s ideal for outdoor work), and exchanging greetings with Barbara, editor of the venerable Garrett Park Bugle, for which, as you know, UD writes (Barbara was working in her vegetable garden) (which reminds UD that yesterday she bought an entirely inappropriate plant to replace a bush that got eaten by deer — a Mediterranean, or European, palm, which needs more sun and heat, she figures, than she can provide, though some websites claim the thing can survive her planting zone), amazingly, as she approached Strathmore, there it was, the Ride-On.

Her fellow passengers at ten AM on a Thursday ‘thesda morning were the usual dispirited lot; as she entered, UD threw them a grin which was unreciprocated. But the driver greeted UD enthusiastically; she took his hearty wishes for a great day with her as she stood on the train platform.

How great will it be, though? She’s going to riot-torn Baltimore.

“Thank you for still coming to our wedding,” Courtney emailed a few minutes ago.

Things are a little livelier on the Red Line train to Union Station. A bald bespectacled guy with three or four newspapers smiles while making his way through today’s atrocities; the guy sitting next to me texting looks (and smells) fantastic in his expensive suit.

Dupont Circle, doors opening on the right.

… wee UD lived for the first few years of her life. On this hilly street her brother when four or so crawled into a neighbor’s car, released the emergency brake, and drifted.

Our neighbors kept chickens. UD recalls watching one of them get its head chopped off.

I remember all four kids, home from school with the mumps, jumping together on our parents’ bed.

Fancy events were always at Haussner’s (enjoy the reporter’s hat).

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This is all by way of beginning a series of posts on revisiting Baltimore — poor Baltimore, still shaking from the riots.

I’m about to pull myself together and get on a train. I’ll attend a wedding there today; and if things look calm, I’ll take a hotel for the night. I’ll blog with thoughts, scenes, memories.

Things seem to be calming down, but universities in Baltimore remain wary, with class cancellations and early closings. Some conferences have pulled out of the city. Baltimore, which has tried so hard to thrive, has had a terrible setback.

UD will be in the city tomorrow. She will take a look around and blog about it.

Johns Hopkins University has told students to stay inside buildings, due to reports of protesters near the university’s north Baltimore campus.

UD‘s grandfather, father, and uncle all graduated from Hopkins. Baltimore is where she was born and lived until the family moved to England for my father’s postdoc year. When we came back, we moved to Bethesda and stayed there; but most of UD‘s extended family remained in Baltimore.

UD plans to be in Baltimore for a wedding this Thursday, but is keeping an eye on the riots.

… features

Borucinski, Michal & Zofia & daughter Hanna Soltan

— Hanna being Mr UD’s mother, and the Borucinskis being her parents.

Together they rescued, and hid for years in their Warsaw apartment, a Jewish boy.

As of the beginning of this year, their names appear in Yad Vashem’s list of the righteous.

… It’s spring. It’s sunny, cool, slight breeze, Garrett Park, Maryland. “The Park,” as some people call it (sounds pretentious to ol’ UD) is in industrial-strength bloom. Many friends, old and new, are emerging for brunches, lunches, and dinners at Black Market Bistro, a few hundred steps from UD‘s house.

And why not? This is the time to be here, a boffo Sunday in the right season, with UD‘s hometown arboretum pumping out its best views ever. Visitors don’t need to know how these tranquil plantings represent endless quibbling and kvetching at the Town Council (Why are we taking down the tulip poplars? Is that cherry tree unusual enough? What do you have against bamboo?…); they only need to breathe in the scent of the viburnums.

All of which is to say ne quittez pas. UD will get back on the blog horse in a few hours. At the moment, on top of her social obligations, she’s got to practice reciting It is Marvellous to Wake Up Together, which she will be reading next week at the wedding of her friends Courtney and Alicia. They asked UD to choose something, and they both very much like Elizabeth Bishop’s love poem.

It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air suddenly clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.

And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one’s back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

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‘Course, UD could get the same message across at the ceremony by clearing her throat and singing this.

… is titled Splashdown at Penn Place.

A snapshot of life in the town in which UD grew up. The town where, after college, grad school, and ten years on Capitol Hill, she bought a house.

(The zzz is a typo.)

… striding the campus. A camera crew trails him. He’s got the whole get-up, including the funny white ponytail. Like this.

I’m pretty sure this is related to the fact that prospective students are here this weekend (what luck for the school – it’s one of the most beautiful spring seasons I’ve seen in DC) to decide whether, having been admitted, they’d like to attend GW.

I just got out of a lunch for students admitted to the university honors program (UD teaches university honors courses). Families were there too, asking questions about the program, some of which UD tried to answer. We were in the City View Room in one of the newer buildings on campus, and after the lunch UD went out to its balcony to see about that city view.

Quite wonderful – the shining river, monuments galore, the grasses and trees of a heavily gardened city. Less thrilling were the squat brown buildings (State Department, etc.) that huddle everywhere and make up most of official Washington. I watched some planes land at National and then went downstairs and walked around.

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Yesterday was mild and sunny – a quintessentially April day in Garrett Park, with the white blossoms popping out on UD‘s dogwood and the hydrangea budding like mad.

For a dead end street in a rather obscure town, the setting was noisy: Our neighbors across the street are selling their house (yours for a million dollars), and they had a large crew duding up the garden; other neighbors were leaf blowing and lawn mowing and playing basketball. Trains occasionally steamed through along the nearby CSX tracks, and large groups of cyclists bombed by.

A cardinal kept shrieking at me. It has built its nest in one of our front bushes, and it wants me to get the hell out of my garden.

UD herself was noiseless: She just stood in her front yard like a dummy, staring up at the clear blue sky and marveling.

… a trip to Italy that featured a visit to La Rondinaia, Gore Vidal’s famous house above the Amalfi Coast. The library, they said (scroll down to the second picture), is dominated by books by Vidal’s favorite author.

They posed the question to UD: Who do you think that was?

When UD instantly answered Gore Vidal, they were impressed.

Trout lilies? Never heard of them. Had to Google various descriptions for quite some time before they popped up. When I typed brown and green leaves I kept getting plant diseases, things that put brown splotches on leaves.

But I knew this was wrong. These were elegant splotchy leaves, a hardy ground cover scattered among my masses of vinca. Some of them had delicate yellow flowers dangling above the leaves.

So this was UD‘s own Trout Lily Discovery Walk – she happened on the things on one of her many walks along the paths she’s created through her back woods.

And how did they get there? I’ve lived here almost twenty years and I’ve never seen them before.

Margaret and Munro Leaf must have planted them, and it took all this time for them to flower.

**************
I found the image here.

UD‘s poetry MOOC (current number of students: 9,821) gets a nice write-up. (Got a nice write-up. It was written in 2013. She just discovered it.)

This summer, Mr UD will co-direct the Summer Institute of Civic Studies and Civic Education in Chernivtsi, Ukraine.

It’s an offshoot of his and Peter Levine’s Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tufts University.

This is the beautiful building in which

meetings will take place.

… Tidal Basin.

UD‘s first cousin once removed, Shenandoah University student Joshua Fleming, interviews himself about his participation in the upcoming 88th Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival Grand Feature Parade.

UD thanks her sister for the link.

Want to know what crushing guilt looks like à la UD? Guilt that she can’t lift the morning, afternoon, and late afternoon after?

It’s last night. We’re at Boston Logan Airport, and our Southwest flight to Baltimore is delayed an hour. Posted departure time, 10:50 PM. We’re sitting alongside one another – UD, Mr UD, La Kid – in those hard black chairs all in a row at our gate, and we’re tired and grumpy and overheated.

Suddenly a skinny young man dressed all in black bounds up before us and excitedly says Are you going to Baltimore too? Guess where I’ve been? He’s euphoric, in a state of bliss he has to share. His skinny black t-shirt says something that seems to be a pun on the word censorship.

I was just at the anime convention and guess what happened to me?

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Now understand. UD flies. She flies on planes. UD‘s a reasonably functional postmodern humanoid. But she is a bad flyer, and among the things she worries about when boarding is the possibility that her flight will include a disturbed person. A disturbed person who in a state of euphoria or rage or something will act in frightening ways…

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So who knows what she might have done if they’d been at an outdoor cafe or something but UD simply put her head down (she had her laptop out) and did not respond. Mr UD got up and went to get some food for the flight. La Kid, bless her, said What? What happened to you? He paused a bit, daunted by our unfriendliness. I… I got interviewed twice… His voice trailed off and then he trailed off. He took a seat by some enormous windows and was very quiet.

UD took a deep breath and felt terrible. She looked over at him and noticed that outside his window an amazing huge golden-red moon (a blood moon?) was rising, so she went over to where he was sitting and said to no one in particular Look at the moon! and the guy looked and smiled a little.

But this didn’t make UD feel any better.

She had taken the wind out of the guy’s sails, and you should never take the wind out of someone’s sails.

This guy, I realized, as I looked around, was one of many funny-looking anime convention people on this flight and I love their bizarrerie, I want to reward their bizarrerie. I want them to know I love their blue beanies that go round and round and make little whining noises (a woman on board the flight had one of these) and I love their socks that are designed to look like shoes. The weirder the better for the love of god!

Had UD‘s (fear-induced) coldness taken this young man, at the height of his bizarrerie self-confidence, to the I guess I’ll go crawl off and be a conformist for the rest of my life depths?

GAAAAHH!