We could look at travel as being practical and humorless, or we could go ahead and call it what it is – high entertainment.
Last weekend I flew to Washington, D.C., for the holiday meal. My nephew Chris’s wife is Russian and doesn’t eat bird, so we had four salads, all without lettuce. There were rice and eggs and grated carrots, garlic, onions, shaved almonds, chestnuts, Yukon golds – you know, foods that get tossed into salads. They were creamy, all different and distinctly Russian.
Then we had stuffed peppers soaked in rich simmered sauce topped with sour cream.
But the food isn’t the story, the drink is.
After dinner, Chris and I went driving around DC looking at federal buildings that had no Christmas lights. Except for the White House, and it had holiday lights which are different in that they’re formerly Christmas lights.
We went by Dubliner, the bar where Irish Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams drinks when he’s in town. The night before Thanksgiving, Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, walked into Dubliner for a Gonzaga High School reunion, and another GHS grad, Ken Cuccinelli, was there.
Cuccinelli is acting secretary of the Dept. of Homeland Security in the Trump Administration.
So, you have an Irish Catholic liberal and an Italian Catholic conservative in a bar on a night commonly called Drinkgiving. What could possibly go wrong?
It did, whatever it is. It was all shouting and maybe a popped button or two, and it should’ve happened under a viaduct rather than in a Capitol Hill bar. Their fight was about Trump’s immigration policy of separating families and then losing the paperwork of who’s where, so everyone is not in limbo, they’re in hell.
I really wanted to have a drink in there. But Thanksgiving. Closed.
As divine providence would have it, there was another bar close by, in a grand hotel that used to be a post office. Trump International Hotel, the sign said. We went in.
It was, is there a word between gaudy and grandiose? Chandeliers, comfortable chairs, open but intimate, and one woman even had her precious little dog that looked like it ate at or on the table.
My nephew and I sat at the bar and ordered Oban, neat.
Trump International Hotel was out of Oban.
So I ordered a 16-year-old Lagavulin. A second bartender came over and asked if I had just ordered a 16-year-old Lagavulin. I nodded and he got kind of emotional. “I Love You!” he said, shaking my hand.
Chris and I had one drink each. The tab was $60.
I hope that my Dad, Chris’s grandpa, (rest his soul) will know I’m just as blasé about a $30 sip of single malt scotch as I am about a PBR at Chelsea’s.
Did you know there are those who actually think humans are a noble and important part of this planet?