Of Spies and Blossoms

The trip to Washington was most enjoyable. It is amazing how smoothly the 500-mile trip goes if a person starts out reasonably early! I was so happy to see this little guy again: the last time I saw Linus he was five days old. Before too long he will be devouring pancakes as voraciously as his big brother Theodore.

Our visit was well orchestrated and we got to spend time with everybody. We covered a lot of ground with Lucy (some of it many times over as we circled the Lincoln Memorial and crossed the Potomac repeatedly before we could figure out where we were headed), including her office and Ernie’s Mecca in Arlington, the Container Store. Lucy had tickets to the Spy Museum, where we adopted aliases and a cover story and traced the history of espionage from the Trojan Horse to the modern day. I love books about the Cold War Era. The equipment looks so antiquated today and I wondered how the spies of the sixties could get by with cameras disguised as cigarette lighters or coat buttons and microphones in light bulbs. And amazing that operatives as recent as Robert Hanssen were still passing messages and bundles of money at dead drops in Rock Creek Parkway. Not surprising that the tradecraft of the modern spy is not on exhibit. Perhaps that will seem antiquated to future visitors.

Our visit coincided with the opening of the Cherry Blossom Festival. We have been down to the Tidal Basin in previous years and marveled at the glorious Japanese cherry trees, but time constraints prevented a visit this year. The past couple of months have seen the deaths of two distinguished professors of our acquaintance, one in his eighties and one who had reached the venerable age of 96. Housman understood the relationship between age and cherry blossom:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, 1896