At the diner where we went for our snack, there was yet another curious thing that made me think.
White people like us would come in and take seats at the counter, but black people would place an order and then stand against the wall. When their food was ready, it would be handed to them in a paper bag and they would take it home or out to their car. My father explained to us that Negroes weren't allowed to sit at luncheon counters in Washington. It wasn't against the law exactly, but they didn't do it because Washington was enough of a Southern city that they just didn't dare. That seemed strange too and it made me even more reflective.
Afterwards, lying awake in the hot hotel room, listening to the restless city, I tried to understand the adult world and could not. I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted-stay up all night or eat ice cream straight out of the container. But now, on this one important evening of my life, I had discovered that if you didn't measure up in some critical way, people might shoot you in the head or make you take your food out to the car. I sat up on one elbow and asked my dad if there were places where Negroes ran lunch counters and made white people stand against the wall.
My dad regarded me over the top of a book and said he didn't think so. I asked him what would happen if a Negro tried to sit at a luncheon counter, even though he wasn't supposed to. What would they do to him? My dad said he didn't know and told me I should go to sleep and not worry about such things. I lay down and thought about it for a while and supposed that they would shoot him in the head. Then I rolled over and tried to sleep, but I couldn't, partly because it was so hot and I was confused and partly because earlier in the evening my brother had told me that he was going to come over to my bed when I was asleep and wipe boogers on my face because I hadn't given him a bite of my frosted malt at the ball game, and I was frankly unsettled by this prospect, even though he seemed to be sleeping soundly now.
The world has changed a lot since those days, of course. Now if you lie awake in a hotel room at night, you don't hear the city anymore. All you hear is the white sound of your air conditioner. You could be in a jet over the Pacific or in a bathysphere beneath the sea for all you hear. Everywhere you go is air-conditioned, so the air is always as cool and clean as a freshly laundered shirt. People don't wipe their necks much anymore or drink sweating glasses of lemonade or lay their bare arms gratefully on cool marble soda fountains because nowadays summer heat is something out there, something experienced only briefly when you sprint from your parking lot to your office or from your office to the luncheon counter down the block. Nowadays, black people sit at luncheon counters, so it's not as easy to get a seat, but it's more fair. And no one goes to Washington Senators games anymore because the Washington Senators no longer exist. In 1972 the owner moved the team to Texas because he could make more money there. Alas. But perhaps the most important change, at least as far as I am concerned, is that my brother no longer threatens to wipe boogers on me when I annoy him.
Washington feels like a small city. Its metropolitan population is three million, which makes it the seventh largest in America. And if you add Baltimore, right next door, it rises to over five million.
But the city itself is quite small, with a population of just 637,000, less than Indianapolis or San Antonio. You feel as if you are in some agreeable provincial city, but then you turn a corner and come up against the headquarters of the FBI or the World Bank or the IMF and you realize what an immensely important place it is. The most startling of all these surprises is the White House. There you are, shuffling along downtown, looking in department store windows, browsing at cravats and negligees, and you turn a corner and there it is-the White House-right in the middle of the downtown. So handy for shopping, I thought. It's smaller than you expect. Everybody says that.
Across the street there is a permanent settlement of disaffected people and crazies, living in cardboard boxes, protesting at the Central Intelligence Agency controlling their thoughts from outer space. (Well, wouldn't you?) There was also a guy panhandling for quarters. Can you believe that?
Right there in our nation's capital, right where Nancy Reagan could have seen him from her bedroom window. I refused to give him a penny. 'Why don't you go and mug somebody?' I told him. 'It has more dignity.'
Washington's most fetching feature is the Mall, a broad, grassy strip of parkland which stretches for a mile or so from the Capitol building at the eastern end to the Lincoln Memorial at the western side, overlooking the Potomac. The dominant landmark is the Washington Monument. Slender and white, shaped like a pencil, it rises 555 feet above the park. It is one of the simplest and yet handsomest structures I know, and all the more impressive when you consider that its massive stones had to be brought from the Nile delta on wooden rollers by Sumerian slaves. I'm sorry, I'm thinking of the Great Pyramids at Giza. Anyway, it is a real feat of engineering and very pleasing to look at. I had hoped to go up it, but there was a long line of people, mostly restive schoolchildren, snaked around the base and some distance into the park, all waiting to squeeze into an elevator about the size of a telephone booth, so I headed east in the direction of Capitol Hill, which isn't really much of a hill at all.
Scattered around the Mall's eastern end are the various museums of the Smithsonian Institution-the Museum of American History, the Museum of Natural History, the Air and Space Mu seum and so on. The Smithsonian-which, incidentally, was donated to America by an Englishman who had never been there-used to be all in one building, but they keep splitting off sections of it and putting them in new buildings all over town. Now there are fourteen Smithsonian museums. The biggest ones are arrayed around the Mall, the others are mostly scattered around the city. Partly they had to do this because they get so much stuff every year-about a million items. In 1986, just to give you some idea, the Smithsonian's acquisitions included ten thousand moths and butterflies from Scandinavia, the entire archives of the Panama Canal Zone postal service, part of the old Brooklyn Bridge and a MiG-25 jet fighter. All of this used to be kept in a wonderful old Gothic brick building on the Mall called the Castle, but now the Castle is just used for administration and to show an introductory film.
I strolled down towards the Castle now. The park was full of joggers. I found this a little worrying. I kept thinking, shouldn't they be running the country, or at least destabilizing some Central American government? I mean to say, don't you usually have something more important to do at 10:30 on a Wednesday morning than pull on a pair of Reeboks and go sprinting around for forty-five minutes?
At the Castle I found the entrance area blocked with wooden trestles and lengths of rope. American and Japanese security men in dark suits were standing around. They all looked as if they spent a lot of time jogging. Some of them had headphones on and were talking into radios. Others had dogs on long leashes or mirrors on poles and were checking out cars parked along Jefferson Drive in front of the building. I went up to one of the American security men and asked him who was coming, but he said he wasn't allowed to tell me. I thought this was bizarre. Here I was in a country where, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, I could find out how many suppositories Ronald Reagan's doctor had prescribed for him in 1986,* (*1472) but I couldn't be told which foreign dignitary would shortly be making a public appearance on the steps of a national institution. The lady next to me said, 'It's Nakasone. President of Japan.'
'Oh, really,' I replied, always ready to see a celebrity. I asked the security man when he would be arriving. 'I'm not allowed to tell you that either, sir,' he said and passed on.
I stood with the crowd for a while and waited for Mr. Nakasone to come along. And then I thought,
'Why am I standing here?' I tried to think of anyone I knew who would be impressed to hear that I had seen with my own eyes the prime minister of Japan. I imagined myself saying to my children,
'Hey, kids, guess who I saw in Washington-Yasuhiro Nakasone!' and being met with silence. So I walked on to
