"All good trips are, like love,” travel writer Pico Iyer suggests, “about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder."
. . . parenting a seven year old is a bit like that too.
I don’t know why Miss S’s burgeoning fashion sensibility has left me feeling so vulnerable . . . it’s a quality I’ve marveled at in several beloved friends -- people like Auntie Weinie, Stephanie, and Uncle ‘Lerio -- individuals so thoughtlessly stylish and well put together that I swear they could spend the whole night sitting upright on an overcrowded train next to members of a strung out Zydeco band, and descend onto the platform the next morning looking nothing but artfully tousled.
But without a doubt, it is in no uncertain terms, a strange elixir of terror and wonder that I feel as I ascend the steps up to the Library of Congress beside her, having just come through that strange little wrinkle in time. Miss S. takes the scarf off of her head, and she, Auntie Weinie, Aunt Melissa and I enter the building.
Melissa suggested we make a visit to the Library of Congress in order to see the architectural detail, and I’m glad she suggested it. The Great Hall is breathtaking, its vaults decorated with passages of classical texts, framed in the ornate floral designs of the art nouveau period.
“It looks like a palace!” Miss S. whispers to me, taking my hand.
“It sort of is one!” I said with a smile.
“Really?” she said, her eyes wide with excitement.
“Yeah!” I replied. “Palaces protect the King and Queen, right? The Library of Congress is a fortress protecting the most important documents we have . . . the ones our country would be in trouble without. Without the library protecting those documents, the kingdom wouldn’t be protected from all sorts of threats.”
Or kingless-dom. Sometimes analogies are more trouble than they’re worth. It’s no matter . . . I’ve already lost her. She darts ahead up the stairs, twirling twice at the top, and I know she’s imagining she’s at a ball. I giggle as I realize with my arm dragging languidly on the marble balustrade, that I half am too.
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| Copy of the Maryland Gazette, dated 1755 |
We head into the exhibit of Thomas Jefferson’s Library together, and I begin looking at documents on display as Miss S. watches an interpretative video nearby.
My attention is drawn toward an issue of the Maryland Gazette, dated 25 July 1776. In a single, unassuming column, the new form of association, the new form of community is declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...”
Two columns over are three printed advertisements from slave owners, posting descriptions of their fugitive property, and rewards for their return.
“S.?” I say without looking up.
“Yeah, Mom?”
“Come here. I want to show you something.”
If Pico Iyer is right, and journeys back to places we’ve been draw us into disorienting encounters with our earlier selves, a trip to Washington is an encounter with countless other phantoms as well, and each ghost is a storyteller. The bedrock of this city isn’t eastern granite, but this set of inspiring principles set in dialogue with the injustices that mar our nation’s history.
This place is utterly haunted. The lives that have intersected with Jefferson’s extraordinary treatise, who have interpreted it, undermined it, and slowly nurtured this nation into accord with the principles the Declaration calls for, continue to leave trace elements in the air. We draw them in with every breath.
I want S. to feel this. I want her to feel the grave and extraordinary power of Jefferson’s idea of human community and of human freedom. I want her to know this nation for what it is: an awe inspiring ideal, and a process that is fraught with willful blindness, self-interest, missteps, deference. I want her to have the reverence I have for the spirits that haunt this city, the lessons that they have to teach us.
. . . and I’m pretty sure she wants ice cream, I think, silently laughing at myself.
She takes my hand as we enter the darkened vault housing Jefferson’s library, and I realize the source of my vulnerability today has been in my own earnestness, my desire to transmit to her what I value. My fashionista’s burgeoning sense of style is only one of a whole host of other forms of independence that she is slowly gaining the right to exercise . . . but it is that capacity for self-determination, of her being able to choose what I do not value, that absolutely freaks me out.
And the terribly undemocratic truth of this sentiment freaks me out even more.
Part One
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