Some time back, Joyce and I were driving through the desert when we saw a sign by the side of the road saying ”Desert Museum ahead. Two-Headed Snake!
Petrified Eggs! Last Gas 42 miles!”
”Let`s stop,” I said, and started to slow down.
”Come on,” my wife groaned, ”you`re not really interested in a snake with an identity problem or a handful of rocklike eggs or egglike rocks.”
”You don`t experience the world by zipping through it,” I said, pulling off the road at the gas station/museum.
”All right,” she said. ”But when I pick a place I want to see, there`ll be no arguments, all right?”
”It`s a deal.”
The eggs looked like some we`d seen in Vancouver, only in Canada they called them jade eggs. The two-headed snake wasn`t much of a thrill, either. It just looked twice as dumb as a one-headed snake.
But it was a life experience, and I wound up ahead of the game when Joyce got around to picking something special she wanted to see. That was on a recent trip to Washington, D.C. On our third day in the city she said, ”Let`s go to Mt. Vernon.”
”Wait a minute. This is like going through a house, isn`t it? Because, if it is. . . .”
”You don`t experience the world by zipping through it,” she said. ”You want the morning bus or the afternoon bus?”
On the bus we met a little boy, 9 years old. We knew this because his grandmother was taking him to Mt. Vernon as a birthday present.
Joyce asked him his name. ”George,” he said. And then with a smart little smile that says a joke is coming, he continued, ”George Washington.” ”Oh dear,” said his grandmother. ”We`re off.”
I commented to my wife that we`d never had a proper picture of George Washington except for that one on a dollar bill. She tried to take a picture, but ”George” just wouldn`t cooperate. The best shot she got was one in which the birthday boy agreed to pose and then sat up straight, grinning with a couple of new pennies in his eyes like little monocles.
”Doesn`t really matter,” he said. ”I`m not the real George Washington. He was my dad.”
We lost contact for a while at Mt. Vernon.
I had thought it would be like going through a chateaux, another lifeless pile of yesterdays with cut stone on the outside and faded tapestries on the inside.
Not even close. Mt. Vernon was alive. Or felt that way. The estate was manicured, green and clean. The crowds were orderly, and the personnel, mostly mature women, were courteous.
Just before the line got to the door, one of the ladies told us about the house. And I began to feel that maybe the father of our country and I were, somehow, kindred spirits.
”You`ll notice, though it looks like it`s made from stone blocks, it`s really just wood.”
She explained that the Washington family had saved a lot of money by building the house from wood cut to resemble stone. Then the wood was varnished, and sand was embedded in the wet varnish; it was varnished and sanded over and over until it actually looked like masonry.
”You`ll note,” said the lady, ”that it`s not even hardwood, just plain Virginia pine. And the inside doors are the same, pine, but painted to look like hardwood.”
I was beginning to feel better about all the veneer in my own GI house back in California. Mt. Vernon was not very sumptuous on the inside, either. It was a well-appointed farmhouse, and so well kept up that it really looked as if the family had just gone away for a few minutes.
The table in the small dining room was set for dinner, which looked like a hearty stew. It was a hot day, but the room seemed cool because of its green walls, a color Washington chose because he found it ”grateful to the eye.”
In a larger, more formal room, also green, our guide told us the Washingtons had been entertaining when George learned he had been elected president of the United States. It had been on the night of April 14, 1789.
Hearing this gave us a shock: When the guide mentioned the date, it was like being pulled abruptly back into the present.
In the master bedroom, someone remarked that the bed seemed a little short for a man reputed to have been close to 6 feet 4.
”No sir,” the guide said. ”He was just over 6 foot 2. All the beds in the house were built to accommodate a man of his stature.”
Then the feeling that the family had just stepped out faded and was gone when the guide said, ”It was in that bed that George Washington died.”
Someone said, ”Ohhh,” as if the information was unexpected. It was the 9-year-old from the bus. Young ”George” was gazing at the bed as if the first president were still in it.
”The president died of what we now know as strep throat,” the guide said, ”and there were three doctors in attendance at the time. Strangely enough, one of them had seen tracheotomies performed in Europe, and such an operation would have saved Washington`s life. But because he was George Washington and so famous, the doctors were afraid to try it.”
On the pathway to the family burial grounds, Joyce and I stopped to talk with an attractive woman fanning herself with a large picture hat. She had very fair skin and blond hair running to silver; her name tag said she was Eileen Rasmussen.
As we talked, tourists were walking down the path toward the old family vault and the Potomac River. A child threw a gum wrapper on the ground; not 10 seconds later an elderly Japanese gentleman picked it up and put it in his pocket. ”That`s unusual,” said Joyce.
”Not here,” said Rasmussen. ”I have never seen tourists treat a national shrine with such respect.”
”Mt. Vernon does not cost the government anything,” Rasmussen said.
”It`s privately owned and maintained.” She told us how the last Washington to inherit the estate, being a military man, had been unable to run it as a farm or to maintain it. He offered it to the federal government and the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Both refused, and the estate fell into disrepair ”until one day, in 1852, when a lady from South Carolina, Ann Pamela Cunningham, was coming up the Potomac in a boat and saw the deteriorating estate up on the hill,”
Rasmussen said.
She was scandalized when she heard that all the politicians had refused to buy George Washington`s home.
” `So be it,` Miss Cunningham said. `If the men of this country won`t take care of the home of our first president, by God, the women will!`
”She founded the Mt. Vernon Ladies Association, raised $200,000, bought the estate and restored it, and the association has been taking care of it ever since. Not one cent of government money was involved.”
When we got on the bus again for the 20-mile trip back to Washington, young ”George” was more than a little subdued. We were almost back to Alexandria before he said anything. ”I`m not really named George
Washington,” he said.
”What is your name?”
”Fulgoni,” he said. ”And George Washington wasn`t really my dad.”
”I didn`t really think he was.”
Later, though, I did a little rethinking. As the father of his country, George Washington was in a sense a father to all of us. So young Master Fulgoni was right.
And I`d like to say a little something to members, past and present, of the Mt. Vernon Ladies Association and to Ann Pamela Cunningham, wherever she may be: Thank you.
