Last weekend my husband and I visited Washington, D.C. to attend the National Book Festival. The day of the festival could not have been less conducive to enjoying and outdoor event; it was cold for late September and no matter how hard I willed it to stop, the rain simply would not let up. After seeing only three authors speak--he saw James Patterson and John Irving, I went the YA route like a good middle school teacher and listened to Lois Lowry and Sharon Creech, and we watched Julia Alvarez together--we gave up and retired to the Smithsonian.
Having previously attempted to use the restrooms in the Natural History Museum only to find a mysterious line formed at the front door of the museum itself, we decided instead to take a quick tour through the American History Museum, thinking the line situation must be unique to the more popular museum. We were wrong. The line was not mysterious. It was the same line that snaked around the plastic airport security ropes in front of every single museum and public place in the District of Columbia. We visited the Pavilion Shops in the Old Post Office, and were met with the same metal detectors, the same conveyor belts, and the same grumpy men in uniform with plastic purse-probing sticks.
Wet and cold, I was beyond annoyed. I was indignant. How could they do such a thing? Didn’t this seriously affect the amount of people that would visit the museums? And, more importantly, did this mean I would no longer have easy access to clean, marble-tiled restrooms any time I wanted? After all, these were the same buildings I used to walk through to get from the Mall to the Ariel Rios building on my way back from lunch. The same buildings I’d run into to pick up a Degas print umbrella for my mother to bring home as a birthday gift. The very buildings I’d been to so many times, unfettered by lines or national security...ten years ago.
It really had been that long since I’d been there. The summer of 2000 was the summer I spent in D.C. I wasn’t yet old enough to drink, and the world was a much different place. Ten years ago.
We toured the museum, though it seemed that in those ten years the building had changed; more than the simple addition of various security devices, most of the things that made the building beautiful had been ‘renovated’. It was cold and stark, more like the National Gallery than the grandma’s attic of Americana it had once been. Ten years. So much had changed.
My husband led me around, and I got to see the gunboat Philadelphia, which I had heard all about on my guided tour of Lake Champlain this past August--it was not impressive, unless you count how impressive it is that something so big, ugly, and poorly constructed could ever float. He then steered me towards an exhibit called ‘The Price of Freedom: Americans at War’, which had the requisite flute and drum music playing softly in the background as we entered. The exhibit started with the French and Indian War, continued on through the Revolution, the Civil War, past all of those little wars the middle school history books skip--you know, like World War One--and continued up to the present day. I have to admit to being a little bit bored, though my husband was entranced, and insisted on reading a lot of the little words written on the walls. I was briefly entertained by a POW exhibit that was appropriately dark and cave-like, as well as by the Vietnam display which featured a full-size helicopter complete with helicopter audio that would have made my 7th grade social studies teacher jump under his desk. But then we got to what I realized later was the end, where we encountered two large rusty pieces of metal--crumpled pieces of the supports that once held up the twin towers.
To be honest, I don’t even know if that’s what they were--supports, that is--that’s what they looked like to me. I didn’t read any of the little words on the wall there. I just stood there, stunned, torn between the physical urge to cry and the logical voice that told me I had no right to cry, no right at all, as the most my life had been affected directly by this was having to stand in a line to get into the building to look at them.
I had just walked through an account of an entire history of our country and all of it seemed so irrelevant, so old, so...boring. And with one step I entered it, became a part of it, and realized that the last time I stood in this building, those pieces weren’t there. Ten years. So much had changed.
