Taking Easter Home

“Behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him.”  St. Matthew 28:7

One of the special things about settling in the DC area for Allison and me is spending time in the city where we fell in love.  Back in the summer of 2003, I had just finished my studies at seminary and was getting ready to begin as a teacher at a boarding school near Hagerstown.  Allison was a public policy student completing her mandatory student internship at a organization on Capitol Hill.  I’d meet her after work in the grand hall of Union Station and we’d head off to one of those free concerts at the Kennedy Center or we’d sit and talk in one of those pleasant little parks near the Capitol, or share a meal in that most exotic and romantic locale, the food court in the basement of the train station.

Sometimes, when we’ve got the kids in the backseat and we’re headed off to a museum on the Mall or to see a friend who lives across town, we’ll drive by one of these places and tell them a little about what it meant to us then.   So much that has happened since then that we never expected, but many of the good things we do enjoy now were planted there.  Going back to those places, we fall in love again, or at least we understand something valuable about the love we share now, something we can only discover there, where it all began.

Public Address System

“The men said to them, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is not here, but has risen.’”  St. Luke 24:5

The Metro, as you know, is having trouble.  There are serious concerns about financial sustainability, loads of deferred maintenance, diminishing public trust.  They’ve recruited a no-nonsense administrator, Paul Wiedefeld, to put things in order.  Earlier this month, he shut the whole thing down for a day to repair the electric cables.  The grumbling was universal.  It also made for a very crowded Panera in Herndon and may well have proved that we can run the Federal government just fine out of Fairfax County so long as we have decent wi-fi. 

We’re told that the cables are now all ship-shape, and they will be on to additional projects.  And I, at least am hoping they will soon move on to the public address system.  Because if you have spent much time on Metro, you will know just how impossible it often is to understand what is being announced to you.  “Next station..mmmfmfm” or “The train will be delayed…ffhghf.”  I think the announcers were trained by the adults on those old Charlie Brown cartoons.  It’s really pretty bad.  If I’m travelling by Metro, I need to stand near the Metro map so I can tell what’s coming next.