So you may have noticed I’ve been MIA (or you might not have).
It’s because I’ve been out of town. For, like, ever. Here’s what I’ve been up to:
I started off the trip with my brother’s law school graduation.
Somehow this is the only picture I managed to snap of the entire occasion. Note the startling lack of graduates. But there was much pomp and circumstance, and big egos, and entitlement issues, and free lunch, and much fun was had by all. My brother will (hopefully) pass the bar and become a corporate drone by the fall. Congrats!
Then my family went to Cape Cod for the week. It was lovely, and full of drama, and I wouldn’t change any of it.
My photos of this part of the trip are likewise odd.
Here’s me and my brother with my dad out behind a bathroom in Provincetown.
Here’s a giant anchor, which we seem to have five different photographs of.
Here’s me and Wayne some place I can’t identify, but is sandwiched between other photos of the trip, and must be from there somehow.
He’s a bog of some sort.
Then we came home for a night and headed off down to Washington DC, because my grandfather was being interred at Arlington National Cemetery. You may remember that my grandfather died last November, and we had a memorial service for him then. But today was what we’ve been referring to as The Big Show. My grandfather was in the Navy for 30 years, and he fought in three wars, and he loved to bore us with stories of boats (“it’s not a boat, it’s a ship!”) he served on, and so it made sense that he wanted that aspect of his life to be recognized on his death. So today, we had the ceremony where his ashes were actually laid at Arlington.
It was incredible. They had this horse-drawn thing and guys in navy dress uniforms (better than Fleet Week!) to escort him down to the place where they had a little service for us. Here’s a terrible picture of some horses’s butts.
Then there was a 21 gun salute, which was seriously impressive, and the Navy band (or part of it, I guess, including a whole flotilla of guys whose jobs it seemed to be to stand around holding bayonets and looking pretty) played Taps, and we all cried.
It was beautiful. He was a man who loved his country more than anything, and I don’t think he could have envisioned it better himself. It makes me happy to know that his years of service were valued and that he will always be remembered for serving his country.
We also took a tour of the cemetery, but were too lazy to get off the bus to look at the Kennedy graves (apparently I’m too young to understand the appeal) and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (which I saw when I was ten and couldn’t understand why this solider was walking back and forth in front of). But there were several old guys on the bus wearing hats that proudly proclaimed them as veterans of Korea, or of Vietnam, and even a few guys from World War II still hanging on, and they were cool. I wanted to go up and hug them, but I restrained myself. Even though I’m kind of a pacifist, I have a nephew in Iraq right now, and probably for the first time understand what a big deal it is.
And as you see, my photographic record of all of this was sparse. At some point during the ceremony I decided that my uncle, who is a professional photographer and had a real camera (these are all brought to you by my iphone) was probably taking enough photos for all of us and I should just let him handle it. Which may not have been the best idea, in retrospect.
And then we did what you always have to do whenever you’re south of the Mason-Dixon line: find a Waffle House. Man, those are some good waffles. I think my grandfather would have approved.
I learned many important and insightful things on the trip, first and foremost of which is that I suck as a photographer, but most of those will have to wait for another day. This post has already gone on forever.
So anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. What have you all been up to?
