Monday contained no sightseeing and not much running around. I slept late, and when I was awake I was working on my mother-in-law’s desktop computer, an Empirical Dementor 4400 that was in dreadful shape after four years of neglect. Neither she nor my stepfather-in-law had the knowledge or skill to keep it up, and it showed. The anti-virus client subscription had expired, the hard drive was full of temp files and other trash, and the fragmentation—you don’t want to know. Even worse, it only has dial-up Net access over a phone line so bad that it connects at 21.6 kbps at best, which made downloading 80MB of Norton applications very VERY painful—as in 12 hours’ worth of painful. For a miracle, the downloads didn’t abort in the middle, so I could walk away and leave it running rather than having to be right there baby-sitting the whole time. While the downloads were going on, I worked on cleaning up the drive, tearing out unused applications, dumping temp junk, defragging, and generally acting like a hired consultant. When I got through, the system was—not well, but better. It really could have used a backup and clean OS reinstallation that I would have needed a couple more days to do. My mother-in-law thanked me two or three times for working on it rather than being the vacationing tourist, which was very effusive for her.
That afternoon we all went over to visit L’s grandmother at her assisted-living facility. Tink is 94, nearly stone-deaf even with hearing aids, and has an osteoporotic hump in her back worthy of Baba Yaga. M finds her “scary” and would barely have anything to do with her. I was a little surprised and not pleased to see she has a number of sores that she rubbed at the whole time we were there; I can’t decide whether they’re a result of fragile elderly skin breaking down, decubitus sores, scratching, or a combination. She’s also lost a LOT of weight since I’ve seen her last. L’s mother said she was down to 86 pounds (and Tink wasn’t that big to begin with). About a year ago she decided she was not going to have any more blood transfusions to treat a moderate but persistent anemia, and I’m sure that contributes to the decline as well. Her main problem, I suppose, is simply old age and there’s a very limited amount to do about that.
Conversation was very difficult and halting, in part because of her deafness and in part for lack of anything to talk about. Tink gets out very little, and practically none of her nieces and nephews, who mostly live in northern Virginia, write or visit her. L’s mother and sister go over and visit, and sometimes take her to family gatherings, but she’s not up to interacting much.
Once we got back, we had the entertainment of finding the plumbers had arrived to replace the water heater, which had sprung a leak over the weekend and soaked part of the basement playroom carpet. (The leak also meant there was only cold water for bathing, so we kind of did without.) They started wrestling out the old heater and struggling to get the new one down the outside stairs, which were barely wide enough for the job. The water heater burns fuel oil rather than gas (I’d never heard of such a thing before) and the plumbers didn’t
seem ecstatic about it. One of them mentioned that they only see an oil-burning heater every two months or so. Something held them up, so they had to leave the job half-finished at the end of the day and us still with no hot water.
Tuesday we ran down to Catonsville to visit Kelly and Steve in their new (to them) house. L, M, and Kelly applied themselves to the backyard swimming pool, while Steve and I sat under the awning in the shade and talked. I discovered a clump of poison ivy they had overlooked, and which I expect they’ve poisoned out by now. Steve was kind enough to let me borrow one of their computers for a few minutes to check mail and make sure that nothing major had broken loose or needed tending (mostly it hadn’t and didn’t). Later we went to the Double T Diner on Balto National Pike for a late-ish lunch, and got landed with a stereotypical diner waitress (good at her job, but still stereotypical). L was at pains to point out to me that the waitress was from South Baltimore rather than Highlandtown, and therefore could not be considered true “hon” material. Back home for baths (the plumbers finally got through with the water heater, and hot water abounded), dinner with L’s sister and “the cousins,” (if you’re ready for this, we went out to eat at a BOWLING ALLEY, and it wasn’t half bad) and more wrestling with the computer for me.
Wednesday morning we said our goodbyes and drove down to Washington. Except we didn’t stop at Washington. We drove on through around the Washington Beltway, across the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge, past DC National on the GW Parkway, and all the way down to Mount Vernon. Of all the days in all the years in all the world to visit Mount Vernon, this was one of the really inauspicious ones. Temperatures pushing 100°, humidity above 60%, barely a breath of wind. We did get there relatively early, so we had the advantage of what cooler air there was, but that wasn’t much. L quickly gave up on the idea of touring the inside of the big house, as the waiting line was already far longer than M would have stood for. Instead we walked around the English garden and admired the peaches and pears that are just now setting good fruit, the citrus and banana trees in tubs so they could be moved back into the orangery for winter (one of the lime trees had put on a nice crop), and the vegetable gardens. The garden is being excavated this summer, so we got to watch a gang of grubby, sweaty, well-built female graduate students wearing not very much clothing (and that worn and tattered) working away at scraping down something that looked like a midden or a filled-in well with trowels and brushes, sifting huge sieves of excavated dirt through screens to capture pottery shards and other discarded bits, drawing the position of every artifact unearthed on gridded notepads. I’m not a fan of grubby, but I did appreciate the well-built and not very much clothing parts of it.
The compound was in a maintenance cycle, so the house’s walls were being scraped preparatory to repainting. In the tradition of social climbers everywhere, Washington built the house of planks carved to resemble sandstone blocks (the technical term is “rusticated”), then had it painted white and handfuls of sand flung onto the still-tacky paint to give that just-quarried texture. These days, the painters use sprayers that mix the sand and paint before it’s applied. There were also crews up on all the roofs, climbing around replacing and repainting weak or rotted fish-scale cypress shingles. I didn’t envy them their perches.
Passing on the house meant we spent a bunch of time walking around and looking into the dependencies: kitchen, laundry, smokehouse, storehouse, carriage house, and stables. Wherever possible L and I tried to relate things M was seeing to things and events in the Little House books, which L has been reading to her on and off. That worked fairly well since farm technology just didn’t change that much between 1770 and 1870. By the end M was drooping pretty badly in the heat, as was I, but L herded us down the hill past the orchard (peaches, pears, cherries, apples) all the way to the bank of the Potomac, and onto an AIR-CONDITIONED! tour ship, which took us up and across the river about fifteen minutes, as far as Piscataway Creek, Fort Washington and its lighthouse (yes, I have a soft spot for the Chesapeake lights), and then back. The iceboxy air conditioning on board did wonders for M and me, so we were able to face the job of climbing up the fifty-foot bluff from the river, and all the way back to the car. By this point it was late enough our hotel room was available, so we drove to Crystal City, wearily checked in, and collapsed for a couple of hours. Later, we ventured out and discovered a neat little Restaurant Row on 23rd Street just across the Jefferson Davis Highway (AKA US Route 1). We ended up picking a small Salvadoran restaurant where we were the only non-Hispanics present (and almost the only diners present, too, which was a pity). The food was a nice change from anything we find at home; I had an tender and excellent dish of lengua asada (stewed beef tongue). L’s carne asada wasn’t quite such a success; we’re accustomed to a soupier version than what she was served, although its flavor was good.
Next: The Smithsonian, and M rides the Metro with Daddy.
Comrade Kosygin met the tyrannosaur to hand over plans for a meteoric bomb. Fnord.
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