Big Jim and Mary. Photo Socotra.
As you know, the English language has some wonderfully anthropomorphic collective nouns for groups of animals. There is a Pride of lions, a Murder of crows, a School of fish, an Exaltation of doves and a Parliament of owls.
Now consider the baboon, the loudest, most dangerous, and viciously aggressive of all primates. And what is the proper collective noun for a group of baboons? Naturally: a Congress.
But I digress. It was such a strange week followed by a surreal day that I cannot quite come to grips with it. I don’t know how you are doing, but I assume it is a sort of common experience for all of on the Eastern Seaboard.
It would have had history, had the great storm not come, what with the formal dedication of Dr. Kings Monument downtown, which was cancelled. The other big deal went off with military precision: the closing of Walter Reed Hospital, and the migration of the last patients to the new facilities that have been erected on the campus of the former National Navy Medical Center at Bethesda.
There is too much history to recount at Walter Reed, which opened for business in 1908, and contained the Army’s Medical Museum, and General Dan Sickles leg, and a monument to the forward Confederate lines in the last wild attack by Jubal Early in 1864, and the suite where General Pershing spent his last days, and President Dwight Eisenhower expired. And the autopsies of the Nazi saboteurs who were electrocuted in short order at the DC Jail at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover.
That storied history is worth a story, one of these days, and the fate of the broad and historic campus remains a little hazy. Presumably it will be turned over to the tender mercies of the District Government, and the increased crush on the campus at Bethesda will be a general pain in the butt for those of us who rely on it for succor in the face of illness or injury.
But the skies cooperated, dawning gray with moderate gusts, and turned sunny and bright before noon. The wounded were moved, and that stage in the life of the post-earthquake, post hurricane capital was closed out.
People crept out of their burrows, blinking in surprise that the fury had passed by with so little damage. Many slept through the entire event on this side of the river, while on the other tens of thousands were without power, but otherwise mostly intact.
By eleven, people were in the office obsessing about the big proposal, and I went in to work on that for a while as other colleagues in the suburbs chirped on my Blackberry that their power was out, their computers useless. I contributed to a separate Executive Summary for one of the other tasks that are laying around in various states of progress, and looked up in surprise at the clock to see that the afternoon had fled, and it was time to swing by the farewell for Big Jim, the Willow Restaurant’s founding bartender.
Deborah, Willow’s Ops Boss, hosted the affair at her place in the Waverly Hills neighborhood of Arlington on a leafy street just north of the gash of I-66. She had been concerned when Old Jim and I talked to her late last week as final preparations for the farewell and the storm worked in parallel. Her house is one of those 1930s jewel boxes, hardwood floors and arts and crafts details, but small rooms and no place for people to congregate.
She was hoping to have everything outside, and that certainly appeared to be a crap-shoot.
As it turned out, it was perfect. Surreally perfect. Malcolm-the-Neighbor came by with a chainsaw to dispose of an errant branch deposited from one of the two stately oaks that shade the back yard.
Heard in the kitchen: “Women need men like fish need bicycles.”
“You are right, but fish don’t have chainsaws.”
Was it possible that twelve hours before Mother Nature was ripping oaks out of the ground and hurling them across the streets? We could hear the thin roar of chainsaws at work elsewhere in the neighborhood as the restaurant staff played beer-pong.
Old JIm in the backyard. Photo Socotra.
Big Jim assumed command of the grill, and I was amazed to hear how the other half lives: Willow had been up and running through the storm, past two in the morning and the heart of the gale. The staff was drinking again at noon, monitoring the NFL draft for the commencement of the Fantasy Football leagues that will start shortly. I do not think that knowledge that Willow was rocking in the storm would have changed my decision to hunker down at Big Pink, but it would have been in interesting option.
His departure is worth marking, since it is the end of an era for our little social set. He will continue bartending, at a place in Loudoun as he waits for the full time teaching position, but he has made the decision to get a real career and no longer live the vampire life of the liquor trade, working while the rest of us get bombed.
Old Jim and Mary stopped by, and owner Tracy O’Grady, and Elizabeth-with-an-S and her pal, and Robert the chef with his crew, and a good time was had by all. The filet mignon and the flank were coming off the grill when I saw my chance to make a graceful disengagement.
Legendary Restauranteur Tracy O'Grady. Photo Socotra.
Adam-the-Polish-Lifeguard had been working on the pool when I headed to the office, and I had every expectation that he would open late in the afternoon, and I did not want to miss it.
He had worked like hell all the afternoon, methodically cleaning up the pool, then the deck and then personally bringing all the furniture up from the basement of the building.
His burly torso and Slavic blonde hair framed a big smile of personal satisfaction. He had beaten off the storm, and took a great deal of pride in what he did. He formally opened the pool around six, and I got a great swim in, wondering at the whole thing- hurricane to blue skies in twelve hours, and the wonder of the warm orange sunset over the trees.
Amazing weekend.
Elisabeth-with-an-S and pal. Photo Socotra.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com