Christmas Tree Run 2019

Today was a cold but bright and dry day, perfect for going on my annual Christmas Tree Run on the Mall.  This year's run was a short one, only about three miles with lots of lengthy stops at the various sites; I took Metro to the District and here's the Christmas tree at the place I started from, inside the Smithsonian Castle.  I am so addled by old age though that although I carefully placed in my vest pockets a credit card and what I thought was my Senior Half-price metro card, when I ran to my local station from where I parked my car at the last free spot where it was free parking 3/4 mile away, when I arrived at the station I discovered I'd pocketed my lifetime free pass to National Parks for seniors instead of my Senior Metro card so I had to use my lunch money, a twenty-dollar bill, to purchase a regular metro card and thus spend twice as much on transportation, about nine dollars there and back.

The day actually started before that at my local blood donation center where I gave a unit of plasma, platelets and spun red blood cells (they withdraw the blood into a machine, spin it I guess, and return it about a million times until they get the amount of concentrated particles they want), a process which takes 95 minutes and is very boring as you just lie there on a gurney, hooked to a machine by a needle in your arm, and I whiled away the time by admiring the Christmas tree in the blood-draw center.  That was my 129th time donating blood or blood products (110 times of whole blood donations--a process that only takes about 18 minutes); how's your donation schedule going?  They like my blood because it's O+, a universal blood-type that can be given to anybody except persons with O- blood, which is the true universal blood type that any body can accept, and I get blood donor calls daily, almost hourly, from the Red Cross which I never answer (I give to Inova in Northern Virginia) and even, occasionally, from blood centers as far away as Cincinnati, where I donated a unit of blood once after a marathon in 2008 as I was passing through the airport (I have tried unsuccessfully for years to get myself taken off that list--but how can you yell at volunteers calling even from a thousand miles away trying to address a continual blood crisis?).

Once in the District I ran around downtown near the White House, stoping for awhile at the National Tree on the Ellipse, and then having a fascinating conversation at Pershing Park across from the Willard Hotel, which I then subsequently forgot to go into, where they always have a beautiful tree.  In Pershing Park (named after the WWI American Expeditionary Force's commanding general, Black Jack Pershing), a film crew was shooting the vacant mostly concrete park and IT-type guys were "digitizing" the statue of General Pershing so they could put a 3-D recreation of it on a WWI Centenary internet site (commemorating 100 years since the end of the war, only a years too late) because ground-breaking was going to be done later this very afternoon on a project to reconstruct the park to create an interactive site there where, now that ALL veterans of the war have passed on, the public can finally learn something about the sacrifices and heroic achievements of the Doughboys who were Over There winning the War To End All Wars.  I like to question people when I see things going on that I run by, I learned this is an ongoing project already five years old.

I went on from Pershing Park to the Trump International Hotel which was filled with eye-candy  exquisitely dressed mature women and fat-cats in natty dark business suits, but they always have a nice Christmas tree in there.  Then I ran past the Washington Monument on this stark but beautiful day, ducked into a couple of Smithsonian Museums where they have small but well-lit Christmas trees somewhere in the premises like at the Museum of African Arts inside the Enid Hauptmann Garden Plaza and ran to the Constitution Center in L'Enfant Plaza where my former agency is located and dialed the four or five persons there for whom I have numbers in my cell phone to see if they, impromptu, wanted to have coffee but everybody either eschewed picking up my call, or picking up a 202 (the area code for the District) number they didn't immediately recognize or expect or were busy or out.  So i happily had a guilty-pleasure late lunch of noodles and mushroom chicken at the Panda's across the street in the food court and returned home tired but relaxed.