Spring Bloodroot Moon
First day, tired. Ate. Walked. Got too chilly. 25 mph winds and 37 degree temps. Came back to the Harrington after getting a sight of the US Capitol, white and domed at the far end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
When I began to scout D.C. on the web, I got on a Washington Post website that featured restaurant critiques. It wasn’t the restaurants that caught my eye though, it was a helpful graphic the Post staff had created to help you find “the homicides in your neighborhood.”
That night I didn’t click through since I didn’t have a neighborhood, so imagine my surprise as I sat in Harriet’s, the Harrington’s restaurant and saw, on the now cliched plasma screen, “Murder by the Whitehouse.” Sure enough, within two blocks of the restaurant and hotel somebody had shot a football player and killed him.
The Whitehouse is only a hop, skip and a drive-by from here.
Whitehouse, in fact, is the Harrington’s passcode for its wi-fi. A natural.
Too weary to do sight-seeing with a wind-chill I went back to my quiet room, wondering what was happening on floors 2 thru 9, and flicked through the channels, reconfirming our decision to cancel our Comcast TV.
But. I did find a middle weight boxing match, a world championship in the WBA between Macklin, the contenda, and Felix Sturm, the champ. I haven’t watched boxing since they were sponsored by Gillette Razors and that was in the fifties, but I watched this one.
No knock-out punches, but a lot of gamy attacking by the contenda and a lot of backing up by the champ. There was blood, some. Shots of faces crushed by left and right hand jabs. Uppercuts. The occasional clinch, but mostly strategic holding up of gloves followed by flurries of punches. Boxing seems almost quaint with mixed martial arts, Ultimate Fighting, now enjoying popularity.
The bout had a Hemingwayesque aura, perhaps a bit of the 1940’s. The referees were all Latino one from the U.S., one from Puerto Rico and one from Spain. They went with the German though the Irishman, Macklin, could have won it, too. At least that’s what the announcer said.
It was Hemingway and contestants bloodying each other up and the Spanish referee that led me to bull fighting. There is, in both boxing and bull-fighting, a suspicion that you shouldn’t really be watching. Two adults pounding each other with their fists? A whole raft of folks against one bull whose only way to leave the contest is dead? (Yes, there are the rare exceptions where the crowd saves the bull, but most of the time the bull dies.)
This wasn’t the I planned my first evening of this pre-Raphaelite immersion, but there you are anyhow.