Then we went to the Portrait Gallery. It wasn’t what I was expecting. I thought it was going to be all portraits of famous people throughout history and that it was going to be all paintings. I don’t have a reason for thinking that; it’s just what I got into my head. It wasn’t like that at all for the first few exhibits. Some were random photos of ordinary people, many of which I did not “get”. There were also big black and whites of celebrities, but they were all previously published or taken originally for magazines. I wasn’t sure what the appeal was there either. “Oh look, a giant photo of a famous person’s face!” Then we got to the historical portraits. There were paintings of influential theologians, politicians, philosophers, inventors, movers and shakers. These, I liked. But I hit my wall shortly after the discovery of the interesting part of the museum and I couldn’t do anything else.
We started off Sunday by going to the 9/11 memorial at the Pentagon. It’s right by where the plane crashed into the building. The memorial is a sea of what look kind of like angled benches that are reminiscent of airplane wings. I’m curious to find out now who designed it and what the significance is of the shape they chose. Even though there is no color in the memorial, it reminded me of a garden. The ground is gravel, the cement wings are coming out of the ground, and there are trees but they were all budless and bloomless and gray-brown. Each bench is in a line with others, radiating from a plaque with a year on it. Some benches point toward the Pentagon building, and some point away from the building. A guard explained the significance of all of it to us. The year is when the person whose name is on the bench was born. If the name was on the end of the bench facing the Pentagon, they were on the plane. If the name was facing out, they were in the Pentagon. Under each bench is a little pool. If the person had family on the plane, the other family member’s names were on a plaque on the bottom of the little pool. Each member has their own memorial bench in line with the year they were born. I walked around the plaques, looking for the year I was born. The years jump from 1990 to 1979. An entire generation was spared death in that particular attack.
Someone had put a flower on one of the benches. It was a striking dark orange color; the only color in the place. I took pictures but they don’t capture how beautiful it made the whole memorial… just the one flower. Looking at the Pentagon, you can see where the plane hit because the new section of the wall is clean. It’s distinctly lighter than the sections on either side. Even that is a memorial, to me. It was symbolic of the will to go on, the determination of America to carry on as normal, as well as the loss of that day, and the refusal of the people in the Pentagon to be cowed.
We saw the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials after that. It was a ton of walking. It’s a long way between the two, so we got glimpses of other memorials in between. Even with the giganticness of the statues, I think Lincoln’s is much more human than Jefferson’s. The way Abe is sitting communicates that yes he accomplished major things, and here he is enthroned for our memory and admiration, but then you look closely. He has one hand clenched in a fist, one hand open. One foot is firmly planted, and the other is sticking out, like he was thinking about slouching down for a minute. He’s just a man, after all, but with the right skills at the right time to change the country.
Sunday night I just hung out at the hotel while William went on a night tour with most of our group. The few of us left had a good time getting caught up on who did what during the day. I wish we could stay longer in DC. There’s so much to see… and I’ll see it next year.
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