Mining the Diaries 82: USA 2011
Adam’s Inn, Washington DC
Adam’s Inn occupies a brick-built three-storey house from around early 1900s in a smart residential area developed by members if the Smithsonian Institution. It is clean homely, domestic in feel with unfussy decoration. Breakfast is simple – cereals breads, cheese, butter, jam, tea and coffee. Its help yourself with no fussing kitchen staff – it has something of a youth hostel feel about it.
We eat breakfast round a large communal table. Other guests are from various parts of the States – Iowa, Tennessee, Minnesota, North Carolina. All talkative and anticipating Christmas with their families. They exchanging tales of travel, work and life in the different states. A man from San Diego, a FedEx engineer, is going to edit The Hook, magazine of the Tailhook Association. Kit Thornton is a lawyer, writer, actor and a self-opinionated self-publicist. One couple has a married daughter who has just adopted five Lithuanian children aged five to 13, they describe her variously as brave and crazy. An anthropologist has studied indigenous people in Rajasthan; his mother came over to the US from London in 1916. An elegant couple keep to themselves at a separate table and chatter away in French.
Mid-morning we took the Metro to Union Station. It was brilliantly bright and clear with a cold wind. We walked round the Capitol to see the Christmas tree, a perfect tall cone, though a bit disappointing, rather lost in the vast space of the Mall.
At the Capitol Visitors Centre very polite and formal attendants showed us an uplifting (?) film about democracy in the US and the creation of the States. It put a strong emphasis on how issues are resolved by argument and debate, which sounded a bit hollow given what’s been going on in Congress over the past year. A cheerful African American took us on a fact packed tour – the Emancipation Hall, the Senate Vestibule, the National Statuary Hall, the Supreme Court room and the Rotunda, the centre piece of the Capitol. Everything presented an image of order and calm.
Back outside for a short walk down Pennsylvania Avenue and across Seward Square to Eastern Market, what Lonely Planet describes as ‘an ethnic smorgasbord and heart of the Capitol Hill community’, in an attractive area of two and three storey terraced houses. A flea market – jewellery, fabrics, pictures etc., etc. – complements an excellent indoor food market, which is not posh and serves everyday needs.
At half past nine we set out for the ten o’clock Holy Eucharist at Washington National Cathedral, the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. A grand neo-gothic building from 1907 – one of only three gothic cathedrals in the US, including St James in Chicago and St Patrick and St John the Devine in New York. It was packed throughout – nave, aisles, transepts and chancel. The procession, led by a censer, comprised of choir, acolytes, servers and priests, stretched the length of the nave. The impression is ‘high church’, yet the bishop is a woman and she introduced her address by singing a song (over-long) about the 1914 Christmas Truce in the trenches during the First World War. Nina and I took communion. On the way back to Adam’s Inn the darkened street had the silence of Christmas night.