The Sports Widow Tours the White House
August 13, 2008 2:38 PM | 0 Comments
My sports fan husband Bryan is a project manager by profession, and he knows how to manage anything. We equate his job at work to the plate twirlers in Cirque de Soleil; you know those people who twirl plates simultaneously from every appendage on their bodies? Anyway, he uses the same skills to manage our family, which is a blessing and a curse on these family trips. The blessing was that he had the foresight to request White House tour tickets through Senator Patty Murray's office. I secretly hoped we would have access to the Oval Office so that I could see President Bush's post-it holder, but no such luck. The curse is that Bryan likes to run these trips with the same focus and no-nonsense precision as a wartime general's campaign, and I by nature tend to meander. After dining at the venerable watering hole Old Ebbit Grill, we marched to the White House, paring all personal items down to keys and a driver's license.
What a bummer, or in the Franco-Wisconsin vernacular I grew up with, Quelle Fromage. It was a self-guided tour, as in NO knowledgeable, officious person with an umbrella standing ready to march us through the halls and provide fascinating details about our country's magnificent heritage. Instead we got a map and a variety of room attendants with varying attitudes toward their jobs and varying degrees of interest in the contents of the chambers. I like the color-coding they have in the White House: The Blue Room, The Red Room, The Green Room, and so on... For someone who is as geographically challenged as I am, this would make life infinitely easier. Someday someone is going to give me a GPS.
My favorite part of the tour was the art collection and the portraits of the Presidents and First Ladies. These made me wonder how many of our Presidents' wives were sports widows. Is Laura Bush a sports widow? Is she a Texas Rangers baseball fan? This is a subject I would like to research and report back to you on. My least favorite part of the tour was hearing constant belly-aching from my 8-year-old daughter Caroline, who was complaining about her mosquito bites the entire time. Seattleites are unaccustomed to these nasty insects, and apparently they welcome the novelty of Northwest blood, because she really got chomped. I wish we could have found some Presidential anti-itch ointment.
Remember, Life is a Contact Sport. And, it's frequently self-guided.
Reporting from Washington, D.C.,
The Sports Widow
(aka Nan Hall)
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