Monday the 12th

Having begun this adventure on Saturday, my internal weekly calendar is thrown off balance. Monday didn't feel like Monday when it was here. It certainly doesn't feel so now on Wednesday.

The Seminar—We heard from Michael Genovese, the author of this week's text and the seminar's Scholar-in-Residence. The week's text is, unfortunately, a weak text. While it has some merit, I haven't completely trusted it since page 8, where Genovese attributed Plato's famous quote "The unexamined life is not worth living" to Aristotle. This is an understandable mistake for a high school student or maybe even a college freshman to make on a paper, but it's inexcusable in a published book by a Ph.D. who is the Loyola Chair of Leadership and Director of the Institute for Leadership Studies.

Genovese was followed by Special Agent David J. O'Connor, a member of the United States Secret Service. He was entertaining, for sure. But we got the sense that he couldn't talk a lot about what he does—an if-I-told-you-I'd-have-to-kill-you mentality. It was okay. Next was "The History of the Transition of Power" by Marc Pachter, Director Emeritus of Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and National Museum of American History. He showed and analyzed presidential portraits through the years, discussing how these created images, public images of power, communicate messages to the people. I really liked this portion.

I think the most thought-provoking presentation this Monday morning was "Common Ground" with USA Today columnists Cal Thomas and Bob Bechel. Thomas is a conservative and Bechel a liberal. They advocated what is good for the country over what is good for—or thought good by—the political parties. They base their dialogs on personal levels of love and friendship and mutual respect rather than on ideology and identifying right or wrong—moving out of gridlock and forward on common ground.

We didn't have a small group site visit that afternoon. So we had our small group discussion meeting and went our separate ways for the evening.

Personal Time—I tentatively scheduled to meet my friend Chuck for supper. (He lives in Alexandria.) I couldn't reach him by telephone at six o'clock in the evening, so I hopped the Metro to head south toward his place. Wehn the train emerged from the underground and I was only two or three stops from my destination, I received a voicemail from Chuck telling me that he'd gotten hung up at work. So I got off the train at King Street and walked several blocks into Old Town Alexandria, looking for a place to eat. Eventually I settled on the first place I'd seen, an Italian restaurant called the Pines of Florence.

Besides the wait staff, only three other people were in the restaurant when I went in—two women, one in her 60s and one my age, sat and talked; a young African-American man sat a few tables away and talked on his cell phone. I ate my chicken marsala and drank my Peroni. The women talked mostly quietly, but I did hear the word "Asheville." The young man talked rather loudly and excitedly, and I quickly realized that he was a student participant in the inauguration seminar. When he finished his telephone call, the two women engaged him in a cross-room conversation and eventually invited him to join them, which he did.

I sat with my back to them and listened as they talked about race and politics. Just before I was going to get up and leave, I heard the older woman say something like this: "He must be a liberal because he has an earring and a ponytail." To make a long story short, I joined them for a few minutes, and we had a delightful time. When the Italians changed the lighting to indicate that they were ready to go home, we all said goodbye and the young man, John, and I walked together back to King Street Station. We continued to talk about race and politics and his work as a graduate student in sociology at a school in Ohio. All in all an unexpectedly pleasant evening.

One more image from my ride home on the Red Line, a simple image that seems characteristic of our major cities. At one stop three young folks got on the train and shifted around as seats came open until they were all sitting together talking and smiling—one Asian-American woman, one African-American woman, one European-American man. Although I was listening to music on my mp3 player, I found it comforting and hopeful to sit near these three and watch them be together.