… in Washington DC, UD will read excerpts from the Sirens chapter of Ulysses.

Location: Guapo’s Restaurant, 4515 Wisconsin Avenue, NW (Tenleytown Metro).

Time, Date: 7:00 PM, Wednesday, June 16.

Sponsors: Harvard Club of Washington, and American Independent Writers

Free and open to the public.

It’s late on an April afternoon, and I’m wondering why drifts of white moths are suddenly floating by my sixth floor window at George Washington University.

Moths? This high up?

I open the window and lean out, listening to police sirens screaming away at the site of the nuclear summit, and they’re petals. They’re thousands of dogwood petals pulled up to the sixth floor by the wind.

They seem in no hurry to settle back to the ground, so I lean against the window sill and consider the cloud suspended at the level of my eye.

Usually what you see flying by here are helicopters and airplanes. Also white birds. Some sort of gull, I think.

Down at ground level, ambulances quietly enter and exit the hospital driveway. The middle of UD‘s view is all about the new skyscraper where the old hospital used to be. The university’s engineering department, down the hall from UD‘s office, follows the construction with great excitement, stapling onto a bulletin board an array of photographs chronicling each stage of the building.

Having taught her classes, UD prepares to walk to the Foggy Bottom metro and go home. She takes her soft black leather notebook in which she will continue to chronicle not the streamlined evolution of skyscrapers but the faltering progression of her life. She’s kept a diary – not University Diaries, just a diary – since she was thirteen.

She calls Mr UD from Metro Center. He doesn’t teach today and will meet her at Grosvenor, the stop closest to their house.

*************************

And there he is, in their bright red car, the car they’ve named Walentynka (Valentine). UD washed Walentynka last weekend, and she’s looking insanely bright red at the moment.

“So David says they’re getting family physician recruitment calls from all sorts of places around the country where they wouldn’t want to live,” UD says, bringing Mr UD up to date on a friend of theirs whose wife has finished a residency. “Quoting David: Some east-bumfuck-back-of-nowhere place where I wouldn’t even want to see healthy people… But it’s a theory of mine [Mr UD cringes in preparation for one of UD‘s theories.] that there are, strictly speaking, no uninteresting places in the world. There are:

1. interesting places;
2. uninteresting places NEAR interesting places; and
3. places interesting by virtue of being uninteresting.”

“Tell me more about the third one.”

“Take Bismarck, North Dakota. Say you had to move to Bismarck, North Dakota. Flat. Underpopulated. Bad weather. Conveniently located just to the north of South Dakota. And yet its very nothingness has inspired, for instance, all those Kathleen Norris books – very interesting books, as it turns out – about the spiritual fascination of nothingness.”

“Let’s buy a house in Bismarck. I’ll check it out on the web. We know absolutely nothing about Bismarck. Right? Absolutely nothing.”

“Absolutely nothing.”

So after dinner at a new Japanese place on the Rockville Pike, we drive home and Mr UD gets to work.

I’m sitting up in bed, gazing at the rather threatening wall of green outside our picture windows (I don’t garden or even cut back very much this part of our acre – it’s the dog’s playground – and the wildlife is really encroaching.), when Mr UD bustles in with the Bismarck results.

“It’s on a river! The Missouri I think. For seven hundred thousand dollars you can get a beautiful house set right on the riverbank. We’re retiring to Bismarck.”

… on whistleblowers in university sports.

It’s part of the College Sport Research Institute‘s annual conference, this year held at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

UD‘s excited that Sally Dear will be on the same panel.

… his niece’s newborn.

*********************

La Kid.

UD knows Stuart Umpleby, a colleague of hers at George Washington University, very slightly. A business professor, he teaches Management 201, one of whose recent students (Fall 2007) appears to have been the Qatari diplomat who dealt with being caught smoking on a plane the other day by quipping that he was trying to light his shoe.

UD accompanied Mr UD to church in Cambridge this morning. UD is not Catholic, but she’s intrigued enough by Catholic ritual to want to see churches in action occasionally, and Easter’s the big blowout.

It was odd. As they waited in a line that snaked around St. Paul Church, protesters holding signs that said YOU’RE DOOMED TO HELL shouted at them. Then, inside the church, as the priest sermonized about Adam and Eve, a big piece of masonry suddenly crashed down from the ceiling.

It didn’t hit anybody. The priest made a joke about the building fund and everyone laughed.

Bizarre summer weather yesterday brought lightly dressed crowds to the cafés of Cambridge. As UD walked to the florist near Harvard Square, she wondered at the sunlit clarity of this usually gray city, and at the smiling milling crowds all around her, also full of wondering people.

The flower shop burst onto the street with a confusion of bulbs; no one knew what to buy. More milling. UD finally chose five huge dusty hydrangea blossoms that kept falling out of the paper the woman at the counter stapled around them. UD also bought lilacs.

“Excuse me.” A man and a woman approached UD as she crossed back into Harvard Yard. “Where’s the forest?”

“Er, the forest? You mean you’re looking for the woods? Here? … Or do you mean a shop or a restaurant called The Forest?”

“No, no. The florist.”

UD glanced at the flowers in her arms and giggled. And gave directions.

… for a Polish Easter. Blogging will be a bit light.

At the Café Maure de la Mosquée.

With friends. She’s the one with
blond hair and glasses.

… writes a letter to the Washington Post.

… will have a letter published shortly in the Washington Post.

She will not give away its content, but she will share with you the headline the Post editors have placed atop it:

ACADEMIES OF LEARNING… AND LAUGHS

She will of course link to it when it appears.

At seven AM pickup trucks arrive. They back up to the boat slips and their drivers unload ropes and pots and throw them into the back of the boats.

They’re going eeling. I think.

Last night we watched the sunset and then a canopy of stars over the dark bay. From here.

Sun’s up on this side now. Downstairs, our innkeepers prepare breakfast.

… for a few days on Tilghman Island.

Blogging continues throughout.

“… We went to the Café Maure de la
Mosquée de Paris and got lots of
peppermint tea and smoked a little
bit of hookah and we felt very authentic.
It was really fun. We just sat and talked
for two hours. We saw the Arc de Triomphe
last night which was awesome and tonight
we’re going to the Eiffel Tower and getting
dinner by Musée d’Orsay. We got a really
yummy dinner last night at a restaurant
called something Odéon and then we
just wandered around St Germain…”

After the massive snow, a sudden and massive spring in Garrett Park.

As I walked my acre just now, picking up small limbs from yesterday’s windstorm and large limbs from last month’s snowstorm, I saw the son of friends of ours. They live at the bottom of Rokeby Avenue.

He was bent over in the forest adjacent to our place, examining white flowers. He’s La Kid’s age, studying to be a chef.

“Find any unusual plants?” he asked me. He held open in his hand a guidebook to edible plants. “I’m foraging.”

“Funny you should ask. These … crocuses? … look new to me. I’ve got plenty of smaller ones, lighter purple. These are different.”

“Those are Russian crocuses. They’re
darker. Kind of shimmery gray on the
outside when they open up.”

“How did they get here? Suddenly?
So many of them?”

“The wind maybe.”

“Squirrels.”

“Definitely squirrels.”

“But listen. I find all sorts of strange things in the back.” I motioned to the purple field behind me. “Feel free to forage my territory.”

A car horn beeped.

“That’s my mom. Thanks! I’d like that.”

*******************************************

Another Snapshot from Home, if I may. This one also involves a plant.

A few months ago, Mr UD drove a neighbor – an older man, who no longer drives – around Silver Spring for a few hours as he did some errands. The man, John Wilpers, brought a flowering plant to our house as a gesture of thanks.

(I was very close friends with Terry, one of John’s children, when I was growing up in Garrett Park. She works in Baltimore now. We’re still friends.)

But that’s not the snapshot from home. Here’s the snapshot from home. I’ll give it this headline:

GARRETT PARKER WINS
BRONZE STAR
FOR SAVING TOJO’S LIFE

Washington Post:

More than six decades after the end of World War II, a retired U.S. Army colonel this week received the Bronze Star Medal for his part in the arrest in 1945 of Japan’s principal wartime prime minister, Gen. Hideki Tojo.

The medal, one of the highest honors conferred by the military for combat actions, was awarded to John J. Wilpers, now 90 and living in Garrett Park.

… In January 1947, Wilpers’s commanding officer at the time of the arrest recommended Wilpers for the Bronze Star Medal for his actions Sept. 10-11, 1945. The paperwork describes how Wilpers located Tojo’s Tokyo residence and broke in after hearing a gunshot.

Once inside, Wilpers found that Tojo — who knew his arrest was imminent — had shot himself in the chest. Wilpers reportedly secured Tojo’s weapons and found a Japanese physician who, “faced with Captain Wilpers’ .38 caliber revolver,” administered first aid until U.S. medical officers could arrive.

… What happened to the original recommendation is unknown; it apparently did not make it through the chain of command, or might have gotten lost, said Lt. Col. Mike Moose, a public affairs officer with the Army’s Human Resources Command.

… Wilpers’s family did not learn about his involvement in the arrest of Tojo, who was eventually tried and executed for war crimes, until his son Michael stumbled upon his name while studying at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Wilpers did not pursue the forgotten award until 2002, when he contacted the Awards Branch of the military. In a typewritten letter he wrote: “Dear sir, In the process of putting my military records in order (old geezers tend to do this when they suspect that they may be nearing the long slow slide to Forest Lawn), I came across the attached 1947 recommendation . . . for an award . . . If the recommendation was not approved, just a phone message would do. If it was approved, I would prefer the simplest notification possible… “