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Silver Spring dog park
Sunday, September 4 2016
location: near Sligo Creek Park, Silver Spring, Montgomery County, Maryland
Late this morning, the six of us again piled into the larger of the vehicles and drove into the heart of Washington DC to partake in a vegan brunch at a restaurant called Equinox (which is not otherwise vegan). It's apparently a limited exercise in celebrity chef idealism in the context of DC food culture. In any case, I'm more of a lupper person than a brunch person. It was served buffet-style, a little at a time so things stayed fresh. There were a number of good thing, particularly the tempura cauliflower on rice and, to a lesser-extent, risotto. I was less excited about the melon gazpacho soup and the tofu scramble (which had to be ordered special). I don't like the egg connotations attending the word "scramble." I don't remember much about our brunch conversation other than the disparity between medical cost inflation and inflation in the rest of the economy. I attributed this to an economic idea I knew vaguely about, "cost disease." Looking it up right there on my smartphone, I saw that it was called "Baumol's cost disease," and happens in professions where productivity increases haven't kept pace with those in the economy generally.
After brunch, Gretchen's parents headed off to whatever they had planned, leaving us to wander the streets near the mall. Our first destination was the Renwick Gallery, which is small and made for a nice bite-sized museum stroll. I don't mind those, so so far so good. And the absurd glass spinning wheel and crazily-degraded post-apocalyptic machine were definitely worth seeing.
David wanted to see the White House, which was very close, so we walked over to the fence keeping people off its north lawn. There's now a second, lower barrier making a small no-man's land on the sidewalk outside the fence to combat the many men who attempt to climb the fence out of sheer Obama derangement. There wasn't much to see but the perfectly-manicured lawn and the preternaturally-white nature of America's prime residence.
Suddenly we were all ordered across Pennsylvania Avenue (which is closed to traffic at the White House) to Lafayette Park. This all happened very quickly, and the last to obey the order was a silver-painted statue man, who had to collect his soap box and other paraphernalia of the trade. After that, a number of guys in bullet-proof vests stood around with machine guns at the ready, their chests emblazoned un-ironically with words "Secret Service." This whole business of the Secret Service brandishing weapons seems like a relatively new thing. In the not-so-distant past, the whole idea was that the only way you could tell a guy was Secret Service was that he had a little coiled wire going to his ear. We never found out why Pennsylvania Avenue had been cleared and why the guns had been brought out; we had other things to do. As we walked past a guard shed, I pointed out a shallow bullet hole in the glass to David, and as we stood there looking at it, a guy came out of the shed and asked if he could help us. No, he could not.
After some uncertainty about what to do next, we decided to walk over to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which was closer than I expected. I'd never been to it before, and was immediately struck by how unassuming it is. It's just a black wall along a path, bent into a shallow V. But, as Gretchen pointed out, it starts out small, as a thin black unadorned sliver, then names start appearing, and before long those names have risen up over your head, as if to drown you in "the problem." In this way, it works as both a memorial and an anti-war statement, which is perfectly in keeping with the nature of that particular war. I'd remembered it being controversial when it was being built in the early 1980s, but seeing it on the ground, it made a lot more sense than all the triumphal arches and heroic statues normally built to remember wars. There are a couple clusters of statues tacked onto the periphery of the Vietnam Memorial to mollify the initial critics, but they're obviously very much beside the point now.
We strolled past the duck pond and across the mall, stopping at a food truck for beverages. I was on vacation, damnit, so I went for the junkiest beverage on offer: a Monster energy drink. David and Susan were curious and took sips, recoiling in horror at the chemical horror they'd just allowed into their mouths.
Our next (and last) museum of the day was the National Gallery. We did our best to avoid art from the 18th and most of the 19th Century, choosing instead to wallow in 17th Century, Renaissance, and late-medieval art. I love the highly-detailed late medieval crucifixion scenes, the ones where faces look like they were clipped out of magazines and pasted in. We spent a long time in a room full of Rembrandts marveling at the master's effortless paint strokes and the way he could fool the eye into seeing all sorts of things with a smudge of slightly different-colored paint on a black background. Susan was particularly struck by Lady with an Ostrich Feather. Susan also introduced me to Jean-Honoré Fragonard, whose weirdly-composed landscapes featured riotous trees rising fully into the vast slices of sky, with humans occupying a narrow strip along the bottom, their faces rendered as hardly more than smileys. Normally in an art museum, we would've spent some time looking at the Post Impressionism, but Susan doesn't like that stuff. The most modern works we looked at were by John Singer Sargent.
From the gallery, we caught a convenient cab and rode to Sticky Fingers, the famously vegan bakery Gretchen always inevitably goes to on DC visits. We sat outside eating very good vegan jerky (Louisville Smoked Bourbon) and then trying to eat an almost inedibly-bad chickpea-based snack called Chickpeatos.
To get home, we thought we'd catch the Metro in the nearby station, but it turned out that we would each have to pay $2 to get a blank Metro card and then whatever the faire was on top of that. We only needed this one Metro ride, and, with the four of us, this was adding up to nearly as much as a cab ride (and then we'd still have a mile-long hike on the other end of it). So we said fuck it and hailed a cab. $20 later, we were getting out at the cul-du-sac on Edgevale Road.
Yesterday, Gretchen and I had noticed a hithero-unknown dog park near the Silver Spring library, so this evening, she and I drove over there with our dogs to check it out. It was only a few months old and seemingly a top-end place to run dogs, complete with small and large dog runs, astroturf, and a natural-surface hill particularly suited for dogs who like to retrieve sticks. We'd never taken Neville to a dog park before, and in this one he didn't do very much except greet a few dogs he seemed to like on sight. Meanwhile, as usual, Ramona was mostly a wallflower, though she too had interest in the occasional dog (most of these being large and male).
At some point a minor altercation erupted, and a man with some pit mix suggested to a woman that perhaps her tiny white dog was better suited to the small dog run. At that point the woman with the little dog became irate and started shouting and swearing at the man with the pit mix. He shrugged his shoulder, because what else could he do? The others whispered something about that woman being crazy and that this was nothing new from her. Things soon returned to normal, but when someone else showed up in the big dog run with a tiny dog and nobody complained (evidently because the tiny dog was getting along fine with everyone), the crazy woman came back over from the tiny dog run with her unfortunate (and, no doubt, embarrassed) little dog under her arm to resume her yelling and cursing.
Originally the plan had been for Susan, David, Gretchen, and me to all go out for Ethiopian food tonight, but after all the activities of the day, nobody wanted to leave the house. Gretchen didn't exactly want to cook either, but she nevertheless reheated some pasta and ravioli (both of which had just enough of that "going bad" smell to leave a lingering unpleasantness in my GI tract). She also heated up a frozen vegan pizza made by a local guy who produces them for others in the suburban Maryland vegan scene. It was plain cheese with garlic, but definitely the best frozen vegan pizza any of us had ever had.
Later everyone but me went upstairs to watch The Daily Show, though eventually I heard the sounds of a televised sporting event. They were now watching American Ninja Warrior, a show Gretchen's parents had discovered on their own and begun recording. Evidently it's good teevee, because they wouldn't shut up about it after they'd seen one or two episodes.
Outside Equinox. From left: Gretchen, her mother, David, Susan, and Gretchen's father.
A stained glass window in the Renwick Gallery.
A cat from the lower left-hand corner of Hendrik Goltzius' The Fall of Man.
A creepy anthropoid lion painted by an artist who had evidently never actually seen one.
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