"Real" Time: September 21st 1986

Dream Time: Late summer, probably September. 1969 is "best fit" for the year.

Old Washingtonians, Dad and I ignore parades, inaugurations, demonstrations and the like; but the glimpse of this we've seen on TV, and that it's barely a mile from the house, has led us to go and see. We've become separated. No problem, it's an easy walk home.

Three by three the Cardinals march, their staffs held in front of them, vertically in their left hands; and Rome itself would provide no better backdrop than the red brick apartments along Connecticut Avenue, from about Albemarle Street to Fessenden. A light gray overcast adds a note of solemnity and, better still, breaks DC's notorious summer heat and humidity.

Where they started, where they are going and why they are marching at all are a mystery to me; but it is a magnificent spectacle.

A badly overmodulated female voice behind me. I turn, and see her on a hastily built wooden platform. She's holding the old style, large microphone close to her mouth, perhaps too close. That or her sound tech doesn't know his job. The mike, the hand and arm holding it, and the way she sways as she talks obscure the lettering on a beauty-queen style sash running from her right shoulder to left hip. The light gray dress is cut modestly, was probably bought off a rack, but very, very carefully selected. Suddenly she throws up her arm, bursts into song. Radiant joy on her face...

...and parade, Cardinals, Dad ... all forgotten as I stand and stare.
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The parade has gone by, the crowds have dispersed. We walk down the sidewalk to Albemarle Street and on across.

I can't believe she's walking with me; and the slightest bit of tension in her smile tells me she feels the same. But if we don't know what to say; we know nothing need be said. We turn off the sidewalk into the Hot Shoppes parking lot - the "tele-trays" of the '50s and early '60s are gone, I guess hippies don't "cruise the Ave[enue]" of a Friday night, or maybe the pot smell got so bad the cops ran them off - and just walk. Time, obligingly, slows down. What we'd walk in one minute seems to take two.

She's done well. Not every D. C. twentysomething does live remotes. Me? Here in 1969 I'm back from Korea, on leave before going to Fort Gordon, Georgia. I'm called "Captain" now, in many cases "Sir"; and have decided to try a third year in the Army before deciding whether it's my career.
.
There's a gully at the back of the lot. I see her sash at the bottom. "Protect The Children", it reads.

We walk on; but as we reach the far back corner of the building her face sets; and she starts walking away rapidly, towards a well-tended grove across the avenue. My heart goes to my throat.
But she puts it back.

Turning her head over her shoulder, she smiles and says, "Don't worry! You'll see me tomorrow."
The smile broadens.
"It's my birthday!"