Old friends:

My good friend from high school was up in DC yesterday (for one day only) to interview for a job. She really liked the job, so fingers crossed that she gets it. It would be great to have her here!

We ate, wandered aimlessly around between Dupont and the Mall, and then I took her to the airport. Where as it turned out, her flight was ridiculously delayed. But National is a very attractive airport, if lacking in food options outside security. Not that there are none, but there aren't many, and there wasn't anywhere we could just get something to drink and sit for awhile.

It's funny to talk to someone you've known for that long. So many of our stories are the same, the last time she was in DC, we were together, on our ninth grade class trip. I remember New York much better from that trip. The Empire State Building with Tim. Eating in the nine story mall. Buying pizza near Times Square (but not too near. This was 1997 and we were in high school). The woman who got on our bus and told us that her son invented buses.

I remember the Air and Space Museum, and the Holocaust Museum, after which even our ninth grade selves were silent. I remember finding my uncle's name on the Vietnam Wall. I remember not going to the White House. I think we went to the Capitol, but Congress was not in session. But otherwise, that trip to DC is sort of a blur. I'd been there before, with my parents, when I couldn't have been much more than 5. From that time, I remember the house where Lincoln died. The blood-stained mattress he died on scared me as a kid, in a way that meant I couldn't stop looking. I remember my aunt's dog, Blarney, who knocked me over with kisses when we first met. I remember taking my first taxicab ride, to the church that my aunt went to that was downtown somewhere.